For banks wanting to increase IT agility and decrease IT costs via a cloud-enabled data center, this IBM Redguide is a must read.
The words “increase agility and decrease costs” are used a lot and my brain tends to filter out words that it hears a lot. However, every major delay to a critical project that I have witnessed in the past few years has been due to delays in specifying or provisioning development or test environments.
The book builds on the IBM Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (CCRA) to address the Cloud Enabled Data Center adoption pattern. This pattern is key to banks who want to build a private cloud to “combine the major advantages of the public cloud, such as strong standardization, self-service automation, scalability, and metering, with the advantages of on-premise data centers. On-premise data centers provide advantages such as strong security, increased customization capabilities, and increased control over QoS.”
As banks build out a private cloud, IaaS is the logical place to start. The book provides a maturity model for IaaS.
The book provides macro patterns aligned to the maturity levels that prescribe architectures for each level.
Macro patterns are broken down into micro patterns and use cases. Micro patterns are essentially functional clusters of use cases.
The macro pattern view shows provides a simplified view of the IaaS macro patterns.
They provide a macro patterns view overlaid with a logical software architecture.
The product mappings in the book will need some critical thinking on the bank’s part as they are a bit dated.
IBM is generally proposing PaaS with its Private Modular Cloud (PMC) solution. After seeing the degree to which banks struggle to provide test environments for projects and the kinds of problems that bog them down, I do believe that PaaS is where the banks that I am working with need to go.
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