CSC Smart Business UK Edition August - Experiments in the CloudLab
Experiments in the CloudLab
CSC’s CloudLab service offered BAE Systems the ideal, flexible, fast and low cost environment for testing a new suite of software tools
Despite the attractive promise of significant cost and time savings, not all companies can leap straight in to the cloud. BAE Systems is typical of a global business which is obliged to keep data within national borders and is comprised of multiple individual companies around the world which have long-term IT infrastructure arrangements already in place.
Many enterprises find themselves in the same position as BAE Systems. Although global, individual territories are run as separate businesses and each has long term IT infrastructure investments it needs to leverage before considering the time and cost savings available in the cloud.
Another pressing issue holding back full scale cloud deployments at BAE Systems has been data security and management. For the defence contractor this is not solely down to concerns over protection from cyber threats but also legislation and contractual obligations. Many of the company’s major clients are governments who, understandably, insist data is only ever hosted, and made available, within its borders.
However, this has not held back the CIO’s office at BAE Systems from taking advantage of the fast set up and flexible billing offered by CSC’s CloudLab service. Although full scale deployment is not an immediate option, the service has been identified as a new means to test software before being launched to BAE Systems’ staff, partners and clients.
CloudLab allows companies to set up and then decommission temporary cloud environments at great speed so new configurations of software can be developed and tested. The service is priced to be more competitive than setting up equipment internally with the advantage that clients are only charged for the time they use the service. When they are finished, there are no issues over redundant equipment or decommissioning costs – the service is simply switched off.
Speed advantage
BAE Systems’ Corporate Information Architect, Ian Jackson, explains that the company wanted a way of evaluating a suite of office and communications tools through an IT infrastructure it could ‘stand up’ and then decommission at speed. The tools would constitute a new environment for BAE Systems employees and clients to communicate as well as create and manage data. The new suite of tools was a combination of Microsoft Office applications, for creating content and communicating, with Microsoft Records Management, for controlling and tracking access to data, and Microsoft SharePoint, for empowering collaboration.
Jackson estimates that, internally, the three month evaluation would have taken thirty days or more to set up. When he saw that CSC CloudLab could be set up in a third of that time, and billing would be based on usage, rather than a set fee, the decision was made for him.
“CSC was able to get us up and running on CloudLab in ten days, which was obviously a lot quicker than waiting for a month or so to commission the work internally,” he says.
“We were particularly attracted to the ability to be handed a generic cloud environment which worked from day one, which we could then go on to customise, rather than starting from scratch.
“The billing structure was also very appealing because we were only paying for what we used and when we were done testing, we didn’t have to decommission a bunch of machines ourselves. We just asked CSC to turn the service off. Shutting down the trial at speed with minimum fuss was as important to us as having it stood up and ready for use at great speed.”
Ideal for testing
The three month trial was so successful that BAE Systems is taking the lessons it learned in CloudLab and applying them as it rolls out the new system in a project known internally as Olympia.
This new combination of Microsoft tools is being set up first in Australia before the work is replicated in BAE Systems’ multiple businesses around the world throughout the rest of the year. The cloud was never considered for the final Olympia service because the company needs to have data stored within each territory and wants to get the value out of existing IT infrastructure assets. However, CloudLab has proven itself to Jackson as a cost-effective, fast and flexible testing environment he believes will feature in future plans.
“We will definitely use CloudLab again for evaluation because it was so simple to set up and far more cost-effective than us commissioning new machines internally,” he says.
“The main advice I’d pass on is that companies of all sizes can learn a lot of lessons in the cloud, trialling out new services before they are fully launched. Right now I think the cloud is best suited to generic software, such as the Microsoft suites we were working with in Windows 7 and XP. A lot of our Unix software is highly bespoke, detailed engineering software which has been configured to our specific requirements and so would involve a lot of heavy lifting to get it in to the cloud.”
However, this will not always be the case. As services mature Jackson believes the cloud will develop into an environment where organisations will be able to consider moving beyond generic testing to setting up full scale, highly-configurable bespoke deployments.
Learn more about CSC’s work in: Cloud computing