The adoption of cloud computing in whatever form has long promised to bring small, medium and large businesses benefits beyond their wildest dreams: lower costs, increased agility, capacity, etc. Those of us who've been in the industry for any length of time, knew enough to understand that this wouldn't be an overnight miracle and that cloud itself, just like many other ‘saviour' technologies, would have its own issues that would need to be ironed out - before mass adoption and deliverance of the hotly anticipated benefits.

If a business is looking at consuming services from the cloud rather than from its own data centre, they would need to define the business services, and the resources to support that service and move the service to the cloud provider of choice. This is what we call a virtualised business service, a containerised business service abstracted from the supporting cloud infrastructure.

However containerizing just the virtual business service itself is not enough; along with the business service there would be policies and procedures for the correct security, compliance and governance rules to be applied. All of this makes portability of the service itself very difficult. The entire virtual business service needs to be containerized itself, something CA Technologies calls virtual business service optimisation. This process would allow businesses to move business services around and consume them from different cloud providers - private, public or hybrid more easily without vendor lock in, compliance, security or governance issues arising. There may be other drivers for optimizing the virtual business service such as performance issues, resilience issues, and sound commercial reasons (for example, if one provider is simply more expensive than an alternative supplier).

Let's look at a really common scenario: the launching of a website, where the business service itself is being delivered from a public IaaS provider. If a business were to decide that the governance provided by that provider wasn't robust enough, they may wish to move that business service by defining it and moving it where they wish.

Whilst data security in the cloud has been and still is to some extent a concern for many IT decision makers, vendor lock-in has become one of the key barriers to cloud adoption. Portability is a key issue for businesses today, regardless of environment and infrastructure - agility is key to staying competitive and if that is compromised, the results could be catastrophic to the business. The true value and idea behind a virtual business service and optimizing it is that a business need not worry about the infrastructure. Once a business service policy is defined, it will be automated and then the virtual business service will move between clouds as appropriate according to the policy. This is policy-based virtual business service optimization, and it is one of the key ingredients that will help companies achieve the many benefits cloud computing has to offer.