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"We saw demand surge, causing crazy volatility to get new servers up following Katrina, and marketing programs drove up demand, so we were asking 'How do we bring up computing resources at any time?'" said Bill Peer, chief enterprise architect at Salt Lake City-based IHG, during a session at the recent Burton Group Catalyst show.
Not wanting to be at the mercy of a vendor or set of cloud computing providers, Peer last year crafted a four-year plan to develop a private cloud that would eventually put aspects of the company's infrastructure on public cloud services. His reasons for avoiding the public cloud for now: service-level agreements (SLAs) are insufficient, and there are perceived data risks, a lack of services maturity and ambiguity around PCI compliance.
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But the public cloud does hold appeal for IHG, which wants to focus on its core business -- hotels -- and not be constrained by building out and maintaining its three data centers, with additional smaller data centers living in some of the hotels.
"We needed to architect our inner cloud so we could easily slide into the public cloud when we are ready," Peer said.
That has meant building applications that could live on cloud configurations through a service-oriented architecture approach and starting to take data out of two mainframes that predate the 1960s.
A year into its four-year plan to move aspects of IT to the public cloud, 60% of the data on its hotel loyalty/reward program mainframe has already been moved to servers on its inner cloud (see sidebar) and about 5% of the data has been moved off its reservation system mainframe. Whether or not sensitive data such as customer information will one day be moved to the public cloud remains to be seen, he said.
A definite move will be IHG's application testing and development and if an application passes muster in the test public cloud environment -- and doesn't contain sensitive customer data -- it will be pushed into production mode on the public cloud.
For now, IHG is building out its private cloud infrastructure, which serves the additional purpose of establishing some cost metrics around cloud services.
"We need to understand the funding models in the cloud and run things internally to be able to say, 'This is how we need to proceed going forward.' … We need to prepare our people, processes, finances and mainframes, which takes time to move all that," Peer said.
Let us know what you think about the story; email: Christina Torode, Senior News Writer
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