Community spirit can go a long way

The dynamic usage of the numerous public and private clouds that are being put in place by organisations inevitably means that a lot of cloud capacity will be left dormant for long periods of time. At a time when companies are looking for value and reducing large pre-bought IT contracts in favour of smaller, more dynamic deals, it is central to a good cloud business strategy that every ounce of performance is squeezed out of the cloud. This attitude has driven the community cloud model, where cloud bursting techniques allow organisations to deal with peaks in demand. Businesses are beginning to realise that pooling resources is the best way to use this dormant capacity and that community clouds offer a viable alternative to public cloud offerings. By operating under similar security and compliance standards a community of users in the same sector can simply and rapidly combine their clouds into a community of clouds and gain the dynamic advantages of buying and selling spare capacity.

A safer place to stay
With compliance now playing such a large role in daily business considerations, commodity public clouds are not always the answer for enterprise organisations. Community clouds provide an environment in which organisations with shared regulatory requirements can operate under a centrally managed system, tailored to their specifications. Such an environment will make meeting compliance standards simpler for the participating businesses. When moving applications to a cloud that is accessible to the general public and a host of different organisations, it is not possible to create a trusted environment. As such, businesses can feel vulnerable to security threats, and have concerns about how SLAs will suffer.

Community clouds are bridging the gap between private and public offerings. By limiting access to the community cloud, an element of trust is fostered between end users. The nature of a community is that it is based on trust and this should be no different in cloud computing. Many community clouds are even organised to enable existing members to vote on adoption of new users or applications. As a result, the members of the cloud are more comfortable sharing capacity and a higher level of performance is possible given the way that the community cloud environment can be tailored to more specific requirements. Consequently, organisations that are bound by compliance now have a viable option as far as third party cloud services are concerned.
What does today’s community cloud look like?
Having established the reasons why community cloud is becoming a significant model within cloud computing, the next question to ask is what community clouds look like today?
In the initial phase, community clouds have been populated by small groups of similar organisations with shared goals and requirements in terms of security, compliance and scalability. A good example is organisations operating within the healthcare, government and education sectors. These businesses find it beneficial to operate within a semi-private network which, given time, will expand and become more of a commercial venture as end users place more trust in the model.

These community clouds are inherently similar to public cloud offerings in that they enable multiple tenants to share pooled resources. The differentiating factor is that community setups include only a small number of organisations and have additional security requirements. These community offerings can be further tailored to the specifications of organisations, allowing higher levels of performance. The early leaders in terms of adopting community cloud have been governments and education, with healthcare and financial sectors now also becoming more prominent users. Governments have traditionally tried to install similar structures to meet their centralisation requirements and community cloud models have become the logical next step.

The financial sector has also been an early adopter of the community model; the New York Stock Exchange has set up its own financial services community cloud to support trading strategies. In general, banks regularly need to take advantage of cloud bursting technology to cope with peaks in demand. The community cloud model allows the sharing of services that is critical to the success of daily or weekly risk assessments that banks undertake. These assessments require in-depth analytics and a large quantity of data needs to be processed making the community cloud offering crucial to operational efficiency. Having access to a pool of shared capacity means that banks will not see performance affected when activity peaks each week.

Cloud Exchanges – the facilitators
Over the course of 2013, community clouds will grow into more commercial ventures. They will move away from semi-private networks and will begin to view cloud capacity as a commodity such as gold or oil. For this reason, cloud exchanges will become key facilitators of community clouds.

Having established an environment where organisations can share resources, cloud exchanges will allow for the further development of the community cloud. They will enable companies to monetise the spare cloud capacity they possess, forming an additional stream of revenue. With data centre utilisation rates currently running at 40-50 per cent, there is plenty of scope for cloud exchanges such as Virtustream SpotCloud or Strategic Blue to allow customers to buy capacity from other IaaS services through a centralised brokerage function.

Virtustream predicts that ten per cent of all cloud business will pass through a cloud exchange or broker by the end of 2013 and there are already significant examples of exchanges at work. NJVC has recently created a cloud exchange for the US government called Cloudcuity Government Marketplace where it allows government departments that meet compliance requirements, to mount applications and buy and sell spare capacity.

Cloud exchanges are heralding an evolution in the way communities of clouds connect together. Communities will begin as semi-private networks, but as the prominence of cloud exchanges grows we will begin to see many organisations pooling resources which will allow members to increase capacity on a commercial basis without the need to make a heavy investment.

Looking forward
The step to community clouds is not the final step in tapping into the full potential of cloud computing. Adoption of the cloud model will continue to grow as organisations see the benefits that can be gained from sharing resources within a trusted environment that caters for their specific requirements.

The community cloud will take on a more commercial character as opposed to the semi-private network that currently exists between similar organisations working towards the same goals. Cloud capacity will become a commodity and, rather than just an area in which companies can improve their efficiency, capacity will become a revenue driver. With an increasing proportion of cloud business expected to pass through a cloud exchange in 2013, it is clear that the enterprise is committed to exploring cloud computing further and using it to its fullest potential. Trusted communities will grow into large federations. Taking the education sector as an example, a growth in community cloud could see universities worldwide able to share and access infrastructure, giving them further scope for investment in frontline services. Individually, university departments cannot afford to implement a cloud offering, but the community model allows the cost to be spread across a number of departments while maintaining a central element of control.

2013 will be a year in which clouds begin to combine and connect, and the full potential of both cloud offerings and the cloud computing market will be revealed.