Capacity management 'underestimated' in cloud computing

Capacity management 'underestimated' in cloud computing

The problem of capacity management is the most underestimated issue in cloud computing, recent comments from Morgan Stanley’s executive director of IT strategy have claimed.

Evangelos Kotsovinos, who heads up cloud computing at the company, explained to Computer Weekly that the service is most commonly employed in order to enable “efficiency and cost savings”. He added: “Maximum IT efficiency on the cloud comes from good capacity planning and management.”

Capacity management involves ensuring that a company is not over or under-provisioning its use of cloud-based services. Buying too much of any one service can be as problematic as not buying enough.

Mr Evangelos explained that some smaller companies can get away with a less structured approach to cloud computing, but as things are scaled up it becomes vital to keep on top of things: “It is all OK when you are doing cloud on a small scale, but when you do it at a high level for applications that are disparate and mission-critical, it is important to think about storage requirements and think about demand and supply to provision correctly.”

In addition to ensuring that the actual cloud services are adequate, businesses need to check that they have the necessary bandwidth to allow all workers to use any software they need quickly and easily. This could involve using a leased line if the company is large enough to warrant it.

Mr Evangelos is working on the development of a virtual private cloud (VPC) strategy for Morgan Stanley and has found that clarity about what can and can't be put on the cloud is one of the most important things to cover. But there are also the issues of security, data access and sensitive information to consider in order to build up a suitable cloud plan.

Ensuring that standards are high and focusing on the availability of frameworks and interoperability are some of the ways in which the adoption of cloud computing can be made into a more streamlined process.