white paper
Enabling the Digital Enterprise
Through Community Cloud
A new model of cloud services allows conglomerates and
communities to evolve and thrive in a complex technology landscape.
The rate of change and evolution of
new technologies is happening much
faster than ever before, with new
purely digital enterprises emerging
in various industries so quickly that
it creates immense pressure for
traditional businesses to evolve faster
than they’ve done in the past.
Today it’s common for organisations
to be “left behind” after only a few
months or years, leaving them in a
position where they need to catch up
in order to mitigate a perceived lack of
innovation in the market, and, most
importantly, among their consumers.
This need for unprecedented agility
is a real challenge for organisations
with aging, archaic infrastructure
and application landscapes that
need to balance creating new digital
services with an existing technology
environment that comes with high
maintenance costs.
It’s in the context of this business
environment that cloud computing
emerges as an enabler for
organisations making this transition.
In this paper we discuss community
cloud infrastructure platforms,
the opportunity they create for
organisations by supporting the
evolution to the digital enterprise,
and discuss the challenges and
considerations for organisations
making this change.
The Context to
Community Cloud
Social and behavioural change,
particularly among millennials
who are emerging as a force for
transformation and are expected to
comprise over 50% of the US working
population by 2020, are driving
the need for a different approach
to how enterprises deliver services.
While the perceived divide between
the motivations of these digital
white paper | Enabling the Digital Enterprise Through Community Cloud
natives and their parents, the baby
boomers , is not as great as commonly
thought, the reality remains that
when consuming services, users
today expect to be able to do so in
a manner that reflects the National
Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) definition of cloud computers—
regardless of what those services
are.1 Furthermore, loyalty to service
providers across industries is fast
eroding as agile organisations enter
the market and are able to address
the needs of consumers more quickly.
As organisations continue to evolve
as digital enterprises, increasingly
they are able to cross the traditional
boundaries of their core business.
For example, Amazon, an online
retailer, now provides video content
through Amazon Prime, and Google
Wallet now provides a mobile
payment system that gives users
the opportunity to consolidate
their sources of funding and make
payments from those multiple
sources using a single mobile
application. The traditional rules of
business are being impacted by the
emergence of competition from
completely unexpected quarters,
and it’s increasingly difficult for
organisations to predict where their
future competition will come from.
Small businesses are turning to nontraditional lending sources such as
1“The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing,”
National Institute of Standards and Technology,
September 2011
crowdfunding or peer-to-peer lending
to finance their growth. Tech-savvy
and convenience-minded millennials
are nearly twice as likely to choose
non-traditional payment companies as
people over the age of 50. A survey
of 908 U.S. banking customers by
FICO showed millennials choose these
payment methods thanks to mobile
support and ease of use.2
Defining the
Community Cloud
There are a multitude of
considerations for the traditional
business, and a number of hard
realities to face as they consider what
it means, and what it takes, to emerge
as a digital enterprise. As Gartner
stated: “A digital business is not the
decade-old concept of e-business in a
new wrapper. It is a radically different
and more disruptive change.”3
By transforming the very foundation
of mobile productivity and data
management, cloud computing has
the potential to transform entire
communities and improve the quality
of life for citizens. However, cloud
adoption has been relatively slow in
some regions and industries because
of concerns about security, return on
investment and network limitations.
2“Millennials Ready For Nontraditional Lending and
Payments,” PYMTS, April 2014
3 “What the Board of Directors Needs to Know
About Digital Business,” Gartner, 24 March 2014
While cloud technology is a game
changer for enterprises and
local government offices that are
consistently budget-strapped,
private clouds may be too complex
or expensive to set up in-house
and public clouds may not fit
their performance, compliance or
regulatory requirements. A new
model of delivering cloud services,
community cloud, may bridge this gap
and help businesses reap the benefits
of cloud without enduring the real or
perceived risks of public cloud.
Community cloud is a dedicated
private or hybrid cloud set up to
service a limited set of individual
tenants, or a “community” made
up of entities that share a common
risk profile, specific security and
compliance requirements or source
of funding. For example, financial
services conglomerates providing
a suite of services to consumers,
healthcare providers across multiple
disciplines servicing a single patient,
local municipalities or governments
responsible for service delivery, or
educational institutions providing
services to new, existing and former
students and research partners.
Benefits of
Community Cloud
Community cloud allows organisations
to leverage the benefits of cloud
while enabling them to meet technical
and regulatory needs that public
cloud can’t meet. The collective
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white paper | Enabling the Digital Enterprise Through Community Cloud
bargaining of the community
improves buying power, while the
smaller footprint enables green
computing by consolidating services
in a single location. Community cloud
also eliminates the threat of rogue
purchase of public, private and hybrid
clouds by frustrated business entities.
Community cloud can also benefit
individual citizens, microenterprises,
SMBs and the community at large by:
•
Helping organisations provide
better and more accessible
services through mobile
technologies such as apps.
•
Connecting services, assets,
information and people on one
platform.
•
Boosting economy by providing
an enterprise-grade platform to
SMEs to deliver services.
•
Improving service delivery,
protection of personal data and
emergency response by providing
central access to information.
•
web and mobile apps can
be deployed.
Overcoming Perceived
Barriers of Community Cloud
•
Reinforcing security through
segregation by risk profile.
•
Managing infrastructure by
community.
•
Eliminating the problem of rapid
asset depreciation and inflexibility
in all sectors.
The largest barriers to cloud adoption
are concerns about security. In reality,
an organisation’s current scenario is
likely far less secure than people think.
It’s critical to change the perception
that data and workloads have to
reside in the on-site datacentre in
order to be safe. Community cloud
is built around the specific security,
privacy and compliance requirements
of the communities using it. In
community clouds, security policies
and compliance requirements can
be applied consistently across the
platform and applied to requirements
of the specific environment. This
ensures security is adequate and
enforced consistently across the
community. Another benefit of
offering a secure cloud service from
a single point is the ability to reduce
uncontrolled shadow or rogue IT.
Community cloud can further improve
security by incorporating a firewall
per instance or residence of the
cloud, and can be assessed against
ISO standards.
Benefits Specific to
Public Sector
•
Enabling efficient use of capital
funds by allowing them to release
taxpayer funds from investment
in IT infrastructure to long-term
development of infrastructure that
services citizens, such as roads,
schools and hospitals.
•
Offering a mechanism to attract
tech-savvy entrepreneurs into
the locality. Having a platform
allows municipalities to emphasise
business innovation.
•
Giving public visibility into
government actions and
programmes by creating a
platform from which government
can consistently and effectively
communicate with citizens.
Helping businesses that are
struggling for relevance find nontraditional entries to markets
through accessible platforms.
•
Enabling fast, multiple solution
deployment in situations where
there is no time for complex
infrastructure strategy.
•
Creating an integrated and
collaborative platform that
supports mobile apps and social
platforms.
•
Removing burden from IT staff, or
staff functioning as IT staff.
•
•
Removing concerns about how
quickly environments, solutions,
Creating a greater ability to
gather information directly into
the platform from multiple
sources or touch points.
Another challenge for community
cloud is the difficulty of gaining
internal support and stakeholder buyin. The reality is that the only way to
avoid the crippling complexities of
modern IT is to move from owning
resources to consuming resources.
This transforms capex investments to
more reasonable opex expenditures.
Community cloud is a more agile
platform that brings ongoing benefit
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white paper | Enabling the Digital Enterprise Through Community Cloud
instead of a depreciating, aging
asset, which is important as IT
departments make the critical move
from being cost centres to being
service providers. Community cloud
enables IT departments to provide
better services to the organisation and
the organisation’s clients. It also allows
the organisation to refocus IT staff on
critical value-add projects and avoid
massive capex and resource drain.
A third barrier is lack of service
adoption. Currently, service adoption
in the cloud is a combination of
infrastructure, mail, video content and
some back-office applications. Lack
of full-fledged IT-OT integration is a
barrier that the Internet of Things/
Internet of Everything will likely help
businesses overcome. Technology
adoption both internally and by
consumers is also traditionally difficult.
A holistic, managed approach is
required for successful rollout.
Partnering With
Dimension Data
Dimension Data’s OneCloud
Partner Programme enables service
providers and community providers
to rapidly build their own branded
cloud offerings. Partners benefit
from expedited time to market with
Dimension Data’s global Managed
Cloud Platform™, full end-to-end
enablement services, and access
to Dimension Data’s Global Cloud
Exchange. Dimension Data offers
a 99.999% enterprise-grade SLA
backed by a 100% service credit
cap across all geographies, and the
full concept-to-launch enablement
programmes guarantees partner
satisfaction by taking IT through a
detailed and robust process
of evaluation.
Many organisations have established
shared service centres, and Dimension
Data works with these entities to help
them evolve as a viable alternative
to external cloud providers. The
Dimension Data cloud platform and
enablement services allow the Shared
Service Centre to choose between
establishing itself as a profit centre
(either internally or externally), or
remain a cost centre but improve
chargeback and/or showback to
business divisions.
This unique enablement offering
goes far beyond those found in most
standardised programmes, ensuring
joint engagement with all critical
business functions and allowing
partners to take their cloud services
to market competently. Dimension
Data helps partners educate cloud
consumers, whether municipal
departments, business units, operating
companies, SMEs or constituency, and
assists establishing a rollout process
that ensures adoption and acceptance
by the community. They will also
identify and solve challenges regarding
power, environmental impacts,
alternative sources of energy, cooling,
and more.
Dimension Data takes responsibility
of infrastructure as a service and
backup as a service so partners can
offer other services on top of their
basic platform. Dimension Data
OneCloud Partner Programme offers
community providers the opportunity
to leverage powerful cloud
orchestration technology and a global
cloud platform and to deliver cloud
services to their unique community,
effectively and efficiently, from the
datacentre of their choice. This model
avoids the technical complexities,
project delays, and costs associated
with acquiring, building, integrating,
and managing your own cloud
infrastructure. Dimension Data offers a
fully managed cloud, with white label
capabilities, and a comprehensive
enablement programme to ensure
success in your community.
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white paper | Enabling the Digital Enterprise Through Community Cloud
Dimension Data’s OneCloud
Partner Programme
With a broad suite of cloud services,
a single global cloud platform,
and advanced cloud orchestration
and management technologies,
Dimension Data enables our partners
to bring to market a broad suite of
cloud services in a matter of weeks.
After completing an enablement
programme, you will have a public or
private cloud service customised with
your own brand identity.
About Dimension Data
Founded in 1983, Dimension Data
plc is an ICT services and solutions
provider that uses its technology
expertise, global service delivery
capability, and entrepreneurial spirit
to accelerate the business ambitions
of its clients. Dimension Data is a
member of the NTT Group.
Visit us at
www.dimensiondata.com
For more information visit
www.dimensiondata.com/
onecloud
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