Cisco Blog > Government
As Cloud Computing gains more attention from government customers, it presents new challenges and demands a different set of skills to become successful. Having a clear understanding of the business’ challenges and the benefits that may be obtained from the cloud becomes even more important.
In my conversations with different government organizations about Cloud Computing, three distinct challenges keep coming up.
#1: Reducing Costs. More than ever, agencies have the pressure to reduce costs at all levels. Dealing with shrinking budgets and demands for newer services has forced agencies to carefully look for areas that may be optimized or simplified. While many agencies struggle to keep the lights on, they are forced to look at alternate ways to provide services. Cloud services has become an attractive way to address those demands and provide new services to its citizens.
The pressure to reduce costs has also forced agencies with common needs to work together and find ways to collaborate and simplify operations. This is different from the past, where agencies could not justify or were not interested in combining computing resources with other agencies.
#2: Agility and Scalability. At the same time they are forced to reduce costs, agencies are also forced to achieve new levels of agility and innovation. The constant demand for new services and deployment of new technologies have forced agencies to consider services in the cloud in order to simplify and reduce their infrastructure footprint. While agencies may be solely focused on reducing costs, cloud applications can not only reduce the costs, but also give agencies a new level of agility and scalability.
The cloud allows agencies to pool resources to serve multiple customers using a multi-tenant model. These shared resources give agencies a sense of independence and elasticity, since resources may be dynamically assigned according to demand.
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Tags: agencies, cloud, Cloud Computing, Computing, costs, government, government challenges, IT, trust
So I go traveling for a few weeks and suddenly, it seems, everyone’s talking about moving “beyond silos”. This is a subject near and dear to my heart, but I’m also a pragmatist. Many prescient sages have been warning for years of impending organizational shifts in IT—“Be prepared, or be doomed! Conquer your fear!” is the executive summary of many an article. This is easier said than done, of course. What’s often left out is the “how” of leading an organization through such a transition, perhaps because until recently there were few case studies from which the prognosticators could glean best practices.
So here are a few considerations, and some examples of how to address them.
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Tags: Cisco, CITEIS, IT, silo busting, UCS, unified computing system, VMware
At Cisco, we consider the datacenter to be the foundation of our business bringing us the value that enables us to be a market leader. Our datacenters are classic examples of how we deploy our products and services internally, to enable business benefits and productivity through our own solutions. It helps us localize our parameters and processes for doing business in different parts of the world, with alternate business models. In our Globalization IT datacenter located in Bangalore, it is critical for us to focus on our regional offerings, and deploying our solutions locally in our datacenter serves as a live example to display to our customers how to achieve productivity and agility in their businesses. Continue reading to learn more about the Globalization IT datacenter or visit the Globalization IT Virtual Datacenter Experience.
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Tags: coc-data-center, data center, globalization, india, IT
So what’s with the increased interest in automation lately? No doubt you’ve noticed there have been more than a few blogs already written on this site and others espousing the importance and value of automation. (“Meet the Newest Member of Your Data Center Operations Team,” Tere’ Bracco, November 8, 2010 and “Mad Scientist Alert,” Christopher Kennessey, October 27, 2010) What trends lie behind this demand? Three come to mind:
1) Disappearing cost-benefit of offshoring
2) Increasing skills shortage
3) Growing adoption of virtualization/cloud technologies
And each of these deserves a bit more exploration. Today, I will focus on offshoring and leave the other two for future blogs.
Moving IT operations to low-cost parts of the world has been a very lucrative exercise for the past two decades. However, the financial benefits that were obvious 10 years ago are mostly gone thanks to increasing salaries in India, China, and other emerging countries combined with rising hassle costs (compliance, regulations, security, communications, language, and management) associated with off-shoring. Here is a quote from Sramana Mitra who wrote a very well publicized and much debated article in 2008 titled “The death of Indian outsourcing” (http://www.sramanamitra.com/2008/01/22/death-of-indian-outsourcing/). She writes “Rising wages in the most popular offshore centers (especially Bangalore), are eroding the cost advantage that drove this business to India in the first place. When the practice began, there was a 1:10 cost advantage. Today, this has dropped to 1:3. Over the next 5 years, perhaps, it won’t make sense to send work to India anymore.” Further complicating the offshoring play is the 20-40% attrition rates seen in many of these low-cost countries.
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Tags: application performance, automation, business operations, cost control, data center, intelligent automation, IT, job scheduling, outsourcing, productivity, workflow
It’s a well known fact in the IT industry that there is a spending push at the end of the calendar year as companies look to close out their budget. This year-end spending trend represents a great sales opportunity for both Cisco and our partners.
Helping our partners boost profits and provide value to our mutual customers are two core principles of our partner strategy. With that in mind, we recently launched a global sales initiative called “Year-end Sprint” (YES), which will allow us, together with our partners, to capture coveted year-end IT spending.
YES is a collection of several high-value, global architecture product and service offerings for customers that include additional incentives for partners. These offers span our four key architectures: Borderless Networks, Collaboration, Data Center, and Service Provider, including IP NGN and SP Cloud.
The countdown to the New Year has already begun, so I encourage you to quickly learn more about YES, by visiting the YES Sales Initiative page on Partner Central (CCO login required).
To give you a flavor for YES, let me take a moment to highlight three of our YES architecture offers.
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Tags: architecture, Borderless Networks, Cisco, collaboration, customer, data center, IT, partners, Service Provider
