Top 5 Data Center and IT Lessons Learned from the Cloud Giants

Do you want to” stand on the shoulders of giants”? One way of doing this is to use others’ IT lessons learned. In this whitepaper from Forrester Research, Amazon, Salesforce.com, Microsoft and Rackspace contribute what they’ve learned while “living in the cloud.” The economics and efficiencies of the world’s largest cloud and hosting service providers can provide cloud lessons for all, whether you support a large or small-scale enterprise.

In this Nlyte-commissioned whitepaper, Forrester interviewed many of the leading web, cloud, and hosting providers and uncovered five key lessons enterprise IT can apply within its own environments.

Let’s face it:   the cloud model is continuously evolving. One of the best ways to adapt to an ever-changing infrastructure is to learn what other leaders (and cloud giants) have done right. In this report, Forrester discusses several factors that impact modern cloud computing platforms and how cloud organizations learned to adapt. These concepts include:

• While Cloud And Hosting Service Providers Operate At Scale, There Are Differences
• Size Matters: Large Scale Provides Economic Leverage . . . .
• . . . . But The Benefits You Get At Size Aren’t As Unattainable As You Might Think
• How Do They Do It? Standardization, Optimization, And Automation
• Hardware Standardization And Simplification Sets The Stage For Operations At Scale
• Automation Is The Key Enabler To Productivity And Efficiency
• Aggressive Management Of Power And Cooling Is Universal

The proliferation of IT consumerization, new types of workloads and an explosion of data points has placed some new – amazing – challenges for the modern data center. These cloud giants have battled outages, growing pains, legacy systems, and so much more. Now, they’re here to deliver 5 very valuable lessons. Here’s a taste:

• Lesson No.  1:   Bring IT Process Automation To The Facilities Level
• Lesson No. 2:   Prioritize Speed-To-Market And Standardization Over Customization
• Lesson No. 3:   Automate Basic IT Infrastructure Processes
• Lesson No. 4:   Shift From Infrastructure Management To Infrastructure Service Delivery
• Lesson No. 5:   Break Down Organizational Silos

As you embark on your greater cloud journey, remember  there always will be a push to try new concepts and platforms. As for those parts of your portfolio where you suspect you will never be able to achieve operational efficiencies like that of the Web giants, consider the following:

• If your data center can’t be made efficient, move to one that is.
• Go hybrid and embrace a mix of internal and external services.

Download this white paper today to learn where the cloud giants succeeded and how they learned to adapt to an ever-changing business environment.