When businesses need cloud and virtualization

In March 2016, journalists from the First Corporate IaaS Blog conducted a survey among company representatives. 54% of respondents answered that in the future they are considering the possibility of transferring a part of the IT infrastructure to a public cloud.

Server virtualization and cloud technologies (these are IaaS, SaaS and other XaaS services) are becoming more and more penetrating into many areas of activity every year. In 2016, companies around the world will spend $ 204 billion on public cloud services. This is 16.5% more than in 2015. At the request of IT-GRAD, a study of the cloud technology market in the field of electronic commerce was conducted. As part of this study, one hundred largest retailers working in Russia were surveyed.
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As it turned out, among e-commerce market players, only one in five companies does not use server virtualization (see the image below).



It was also established that every third Internet retailer uses the resources of a public cloud platform to form the main platform for hosting or expanding the capacity of its own private cloud.



An example is the first Russian network of supermarkets "ABK". A team of specialists of the company decided to transfer to the provider cloud virtual servers with the ServiceDesk system designed for automating IT management.

“We came to the conclusion that the ServiceDesk system is a non-core asset for the company and it is more expedient to bring it to the cloud, since it turned out to be more expensive to service the solution on its own site than to use the resources of an IaaS provider,” says Dmitry Zotov, head of system administration. .



To access the ServiceDesk cloud system, ABK employees use a web browser where they submit service requests. Each application contains a unique identifier, information about the sender, the number of the supermarket, the category and description of the task.

The chain of stores uses IaaS in a hybrid scheme in conjunction with physical equipment. The company's basic architecture includes Active Directory, mail and file services and accounting systems, and runs on its own hardware. It is controlled by the technical department of the retail network. However, the company plans to use IaaS as the main architecture.

“Cloud services are suitable for any modern tasks. Virtualization technologies of computing infrastructure and data storage systems allow even complex systems to be transferred to the cloud, - says Igor Savelyev, technical director of CHIP and DIP. “Meanwhile, there are certain risks of availability when moving critical enterprise applications to the cloud.” In this situation, it is necessary to reserve access channels to the cloud, which, with the current development of telecommunications, is not a significant problem, but requires additional costs. ”

Despite the successful experience of using cloud technologies, e-commerce market players are still wary of the possibility to give a part of their computing resources to a specialized service provider.

One of their concerns is the security of data on the side of the cloud provider, to be more precise - the protection of personal data and data that constitutes a trade secret. The requirements for the protection of personal data and the confidentiality of commercial and financial information do not allow this process to develop at the desired pace.

The second point is the issue of security for specific virtualization solutions. Company executives believe that these technologies do not provide adequate resiliency of the IT infrastructure, and the use of virtualization and cloud technologies does not bring tangible benefits, and sometimes creates additional problems.

However, cloud infrastructure is usually built on proven technologies and products. For example, IaaS relies almost entirely on virtualization systems like VMware vSphere. Serious products have been improved for decades, so they can be considered a reliable solution to increase the flexibility of the server infrastructure.

Add here the engineering infrastructure of the professional data center of the provider, the security system and network security tools, and the ability to establish your own corporate policies, and you will have at your disposal a platform for storing valuable information.

When clouds are needed

Cloud solutions are most in demand in companies with a large branch network. Regular opening of new departments and retail outlets requires flexibility when scaling resources, and at the same time accessibility requirements increase. Both tasks are well solved using IaaS services.

“In data centers, compared with the average office, there are clear advantages: higher-level equipment and qualified staff,” said Anton Potapov, director of information technology for X-Integration. “Another advantage of clouds is the easy expansion of resources and the possibility of short-term rental capacity.”

And this trend affects not only small, medium, large stores, but also the largest retail chains. For example, “Hamleys World” is a children's toy store in Russia, occupying 6,750 sq. M. m. in the children's store on Lubyanka.

The geography of the activities of the Ideas4retail group of companies is quite extensive. Shops of recognizable brands in the amount of 80 pieces are located in various cities of Russia. Each store is a remote site connected to a virtual infrastructure.



A virtualized domain infrastructure, represented by several domain controllers in the IT-GRAD cloud, is deployed for the company's central office. As for the points of sale, each of them has workstations installed in the working groups.

The cloud infrastructure of the Hamleys store network contains unified communications systems based on Cisco Unified Communications, presented in the form of Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) and Cisco Contact Center Express (CCX) software. Thanks to them, Hamleys employees use a single communication system that works regardless of location.

Each store has a Cisco Cisco ASA with an external static IP address, and Juniper is located on the “IT TOWN” side. Each device is connected to the provider through the appropriate interfaces, an IPSec tunnel is established between remote points. As for VPN, this is Site-to-Site IPSec with a given PSK (Pre-Shared Key) value.



Cash registers, telephones and computers of each store are organized into a local network using switches and are connected to the Cisco ASA. Internet access from each outlet is carried out through a VPN, and it turns out that traffic passes through the Palo Alto firewall in the IT-GRADA cloud. This solution allows you to view application traffic and control the transmitted content.

Conclusion

Cloud solutions are suitable for those tasks where the emphasis is on scalability and intermittent load, where significant computational power is needed.

“Every year more and more companies whose main business is trading are choosing the cloud-based IaaS platform as the main platform for hosting their information systems,” says Alexander Starodubtsev, deputy general director of the IT-GRAD group of companies. - Of course, not every IaaS or SaaS project is necessarily the most cost-effective solution. As part of any IT project, one should at least consider the option of implementing it in the cloud, and the choice should be made on the basis of a weighted feasibility study. ”

No need to succumb to fashion trends and rush to transfer infrastructure to the cloud, but completely ignore cloud solutions also fail. On the technical side, cloud services today are suitable for solving problems of any complexity. At least corporate IaaS today is not inferior in functionality to private infrastructure solutions.

PS We at IT-GRAD try to tell in our blog on Habré about cloud technologies and IT infrastructure. For example, most recently we presented a feasibility study for the introduction of cloud technologies at the level of virtual infrastructure. In addition, we started regular release of our own digest , and here and here you can read a little more about business cases for IaaS.