"Evangelos Kotsovinos is leading cloud computing strategy and execution at Morgan Stanley.

“One of the main reasons for using cloud computing services is to get efficiency and cost savings. And maximum IT efficiency on the cloud comes from good capacity planning and management,” Kotsovinos said at the Cloud Expo Europe 2013 event. But it is still the most overlooked and underestimated aspect of the cloud, he said.

Many enterprises move to cloud computing without a detailed capacity management strategy because cloud platform is seen as infinitely elastic, where capacity can be purchased as and when needed. But buying resources on the cloud instantly can be expensive and enterprises can mitigate that cost by planning for capacity in advance and avoiding over- or under-provisioning, according to Kotsovinos.

When IT executives migrate smaller and familiar applications and workloads on to the cloud, they are aware of the capacity and manage it based on their expertise and experience.

“It is all OK when you are doing cloud on a small scale, but when you do it at a high level for applications that are disparate and mission-critical, it is important to think about storage requirements and think about demand and supply to provision correctly,” he said.

According to Evangelos, cloud must be used to run intensive and critical applications and workloads, rather than just HR systems and emails, to realise its full benefits. “When this happens, IT executives need to think about capacity management. They must pay attention to potential resource requirements for workloads they are not familiar with or else they will experience inefficiencies,” Kotsovinos warned.

The problem is that there are too few tools to determine the amount of resources needed on the cloud or to benchmark cloud capacity, said William Fellows, research vice-president at 451 Research Group.

“In internal datacentres, you have always had tools to determine the capacity and plan accordingly but that’s not the case with cloud,” Fellows said. “It may be because it is not in the interest of cloud suppliers to tell customers to buy less or buy in advance.”

According to the research analyst, only when third-party cloud management service providers develop tools will cost management and capacity management on the cloud become easier."

Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240177287/Capacity-management-most-underestimated-cloud-problem