Enterprise Search as a Cloud Service

Opportunities for Cutting Costs While Increasing Search Quality By E. Habteselassie & D. Sheppard July 15, 2011

Abstract
Companies that manage large volumes of information to serve large scale client bases find that Enterprise Search technology is a critical success factor in delivering highly relevant search results that connect clients with the information they need. As content volumes continue to grow exponentially and technology continues to rapidly evolve to meet user demands, maintaining a well optimized search service becomes a significant challenge. A team of dedicated professionals are often needed to manage the search application and the associated data centre infrastructure. The systems can also be expensive to acquire, maintain and operate. Many companies are now looking for options that can cut costs while also increasing customer satisfaction with the quality of the search service. One of the most effective ways to cut costs is by leveraging a Cloud Computing solution. Enterprise Search as a Service (ESaaS) - Cloud-based Enterprise Search combined with professional management services - is an innovative new approach that helps to reduce both initial and ongoing costs. The ESaaS model allows search subject matter experts to be shared by multiple customers, improves quality of service and increases flexibility. ESaaS solutions can also reduce infrastructure complexity, provide capacity on-demand and be charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. This whitepaper examines the advantages a cloud-based Enterprise Search solution offers, identifies the benefits of choosing Enterprise Search as a Service and describes typical scenarios for implementing ESaaS.

Introduction
Enterprise Search has become the de facto standard for finding company information. A well-designed and maintained search service makes the search experience more user-friendly, convenient and accessible, resulting in improved user satisfaction and employee productivity. Public Internet Search services such as Google and Bing, etc., are used for initial discovery of a company website. Once the user is on the website, Enterprise Search is used to optimize access to company information, improve conversion rates and deliver engaging search and knowledge discovery experiences. Enterprise Search systems have typically been implemented using a purchased application installed on the corporate IT infrastructure with access provided to process and index content via the company website(s). Enterprise Search, when implemented in-house, requires coordinated support from various departments including data centre management, middleware management, user interface design teams and search product experts. Search experts are required to ensure the search index is complete and the results are optimized. Unfortunately, the processes used for managing content and optimizing performance are often inadequate or even ignored, resulting in severely degraded search quality. Thus, Enterprise Search services can be expensive to acquire and also to operate. As a result, Enterprise Search is often viewed as a "simple utility that everyone complains about" instead of being a key enabler of the corporate online presence and information delivery. Cloud Computing, when combined with specialized search expertise, presents a significant opportunity to improve upon this situation. The following simple case study offers an example of how Enterprise Search as a Service can be both valuable and beneficial.

Enterprise Search as a Cloud Service

Opportunities for Cutting Costs While Increasing Search Quality By E. Habteselassie & D. Sheppard July 15, 2011

A client company had an urgent business requirement to keep its Enterprise Search service working during a planned data centre upgrade that would shut down its search servers. This shutdown would impact the public-facing Enterprise Search service on several high traffic websites that are accessed by tens of thousands of visitors every day. A service interruption would be a major inconvenience, resulting in customer dissatisfaction, additional service desk calls and potentially lost sales. Moreover, the company also wanted to have a contingency plan in case the data centre transition did not complete as quickly as expected. Without Cloud Computing, the solution would have been to replicate the Enterprise Search system in another data centre. This would have been very costly as it would require new hardware, software, search application licenses and a potentially lengthy installation project. The option chosen by the company was to leverage, on a pay-as-you-go basis, a Cloud Computing solution to serve as a parallel service during the data centre outage period. Enterprise Search professionals were deployed to design the solution architecture, address any technical challenges and provide expert-level support to the client company. The technical challenges included ensuring the contingency solution had flexible capacity, that it met the defined performance requirements and also that it could operate for an indeterminate period of time. All of the search functions available on the production environment had to be replicated without any changes or security compromises. Since this was a service to search public-facing content, there were no security issues in directly accessing and indexing the content from the cloud servers. The solution also needed to be cost-effective even for the very short period of time that the service would be used, if all was to go according to plan. The parallel search service was deployed successfully and offered service continuity during the move of the data centre. Customers did not notice any hitch in the service at all. When the data centre was verified to be fully operational, the search service was transferred back to the in-house production system. Although the need was time-limited in this case study, most of the implementation-related activities would also apply to any implementation of Enterprise Search as a Service.

Why Enterprise Search as a Service Matters

If you are making significant investments in marketing your products and services to drive traffic to your website, or if you produce and publish large volumes of web content for thousands of consumers to read, then no doubt you are well aware that an effective Enterprise Search capability is a critical success factor. Industry studies have shown that 30% of the users who arrive at a website will abandon the website for each unnecessary click while looking for information. You can imagine the impact of an ineffective site search if, after 3 unnecessary clicks, 90% of the visitors either abandon the website in frustration or switch to a more costly customer support channel (such as a help desk).

Enterprise Search as a Cloud Service

Opportunities for Cutting Costs While Increasing Search Quality By E. Habteselassie & D. Sheppard July 15, 2011

Enterprise Search capabilities can be leveraged to deliver engaging search experiences that improve customer retention and better meet user expectations. Nowadays, users expect that interactive search and knowledge discovery tools will produce complete and highly relevant search results that match their needs and interests. Experienced search experts are required to make the Enterprise Search system work efficiently and effectively. These experts must be able to: Periodically upgrade the search functions and features to match the inevitable evolution of content, to reflect changes in user needs and to take advantage of advancements in technology; Regularly analyze what information is being searched and whether the search results are meeting its users needs; and Provide recommendations for search engine optimization to drive more traffic to your website and more conversion during interaction.
Enterprise Web Content Enterprise Data Content External Web Content

Indexing

Search Database Search Query

ESaaS Cloud

Enterprise Customer Portal

Many enterprises find it prohibitively expensive to maintain a dedicated team of search experts and end up compromising on the quality of the search service despite acknowledging its strategic importance. Cloud-based ESaaS provides an opportunity for a "think outside the box" solution. An ESaaS service can be deployed with multiple customers all sharing the costs, especially for the low security content that is generally available on public-facing websites. This allows the search experts to support multiple clients and be used on an "as needed, when needed" basis. The search experts maintain a detailed knowledge and understanding of the search infrastructure and customer service needs without needing to be fully dedicated to one customer. EsaaS also provides other benefits that derive from leveraging Cloud Computing, including: Pay-as-you-go billing that is advantageous for both short and longer term usage; Predictable budgets while also accommodating possibly significant fluctuations in workload; High quality of service and performance due to flexible resource allocation; Standardized environment with a up-to-date, professionally managed infrastructure; Process agility for change requests to both the search functions and the infrastructure.

Deploying Enterprise Search as a Service

Five areas need to be considered when planning a cloud-based service: the solution architecture, service management, search technology management, content security and access management.
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Enterprise Search as a Cloud Service

Opportunities for Cutting Costs While Increasing Search Quality By E. Habteselassie & D. Sheppard Solution architecture
The following four scenarios are examples of a cloud-based search solution architecture: Search Infrastructure as a Service (a server hosting model): Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides on-demand servers, storage and network capacity in either a public or private cloud, generally on a payas-you-go basis. Customers would use IaaS to host their search application directly on a server. The enterprise owns the application and provides the search expertise but offloads management of the technical infrastructure. Platform as a Service (PaaS) - provides ondemand access to cloud-based infrastructure and also offers the software platform that enables users to create and control web applications without being concerned about managing the underlying hardware and networking infrastructure. Search Software as a Service (an application service provider model): In a Software as a Service (SaaS) implementation the search application and its underlying infrastructure are owned and operated by the service provider. Search SaaS can be dedicated to a single customer or shared by multiple customers to reduce the per customer costs. The customer supplies subject matter expertise for content access configuration and search relevancy optimization but is not required to operate or maintain the application and technical infrastructure. Enterprise Search (Business Process) as a Service: Enterprise Search as a Service (ESaaS) is a total solution that includes management processes and expertise for content access configuration and search relevancy optimization in addition to the application and technical infrastructure. Experienced professionals who are dedicated to search technologies would provide all required search administration, configuration, monitoring and reporting services on a shared basis.

July 15, 2011

Service management
An ESaaS solution would include various service management capabilities, including: A search technology consulting service to assist each customer to define search service requirements and to deploy user interaction features based on search best practices Simplified and streamlined processes for bringing new customers online to use the shared search service or for changing allocated resources A help desk function to assist webmasters with configuration-related questions and for troubleshooting any errors and product malfunctions that may be encountered Quality monitoring of search results to continually ensure that the results being returned meet user expectations Fault management, especially in areas related to various content types that must be processed Generation of periodic reports to ensure search service owners are continually updated on query trends and search performance
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Enterprise Search as a Cloud Service

Opportunities for Cutting Costs While Increasing Search Quality By E. Habteselassie & D. Sheppard Search technology management
An Enterprise Search application, such as Microsoft FAST for SharePoint, requires expert configuration and management of several of its functional components in order to deliver optimal search results. These components include: Data source management - configuration and management of the content that is to be indexed, ranked and referenced. Enterprise Search systems can retrieve information stored in a wide range of data sources including shared folders, e-mail servers, application databases, messaging, content management systems, file systems, intranet sites and external websites. Content processing customization - a variety of functions can be applied to the content to make it searchable including entity extraction and indexing with document level security (security controls are placed on the document itself), relevancy processing using different ranking criteria, and metadata management. Search user interface customization - the Enterprise Search application must handle queries submitted by the user and deliver the results in a comprehensive and easy-to-understand format. Depending on access rights, some users may not see documents in their search results that are visible to other users with higher access levels. Access control - Enterprise Search services can be configured to deliver secure search results that match the user's access authorization. Enterprise Search provides the necessary controls to prevent employees or the public from accessing specific types of information without the correct authorization. Analytics and reporting - The Enterprise Search application can be configured to track and analyze user activities in order to provide a variety of custom reports for business intelligence and search optimization purposes.

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Content security
Security, and content security in particular, is one of the biggest areas of concern when Cloud Computing is being discussed as an alternative for Enterprise Search (as it is for other applications as well). Each customer or department considering a migration to ESaaS must carefully review their security requirements. An analysis of the content and access processes should be performed for each customer. If all of the content that is to be processed is already publicly available, however, then security concerns would be somewhat reduced. For content that is more sensitive, a private cloud plus additional architectural adjustments may be required so that corporate security guidelines can be met.

Content knowledge management

The ESaaS service provider must provide search subject matter expertise and be able to work closely with company managers to ensure that the Enterprise Search solution is optimized. The ESaaS solution must also integrate with other content sources at two levels: Data source level integration merges data from your company and others (e.g., partners) together into a single set of data; and

Enterprise Search as a Cloud Service

Opportunities for Cutting Costs While Increasing Search Quality By E. Habteselassie & D. Sheppard July 15, 2011

Data presentation level integration presents search results as unified content from a single search index. It is also possible to federate search results from various search results providers.

Advantages of Enterprise Search as a Service

The benefits of ESaaS can be divided into two parts: the business benefits of having an Enterprise Search service that is fully managed by subject matter experts, and the added advantages of a costeffective implementation using a cloud-based solution. It was stated earlier that the search experience is often critical to success for an online business, and also that customers are typically intolerant of websites that are not easy to use. An Enterprise Search system is only as good as its management processes, however. An Enterprise Search system cannot meet the needs of its users without a professionally-managed infrastructure, expert-level support for results optimization, and easy access to the specific content that users want to see. The two biggest advantages of ESaaS are that the: TCO (total cost of operation) can be significantly less than an internal system quality of service can be much improved over what would be achievable from a poorly supported internal system.

More specifically, a cloud-based solution provides advantages such as the following:

Demand-driven services
Searching involves a number of key variables that are hard to predict - storage requirements vary according to the volume of the contents, user transactions rates vary by date and time, and demand can change due to content volume growth or spikes in the demand for information. While traditional dedicated systems would have to be over-engineered to accommodate uncertain and variable capacity requirements, ESaaS can be more closely aligned to actual use and charges can be more closely matched to actual consumption. This is derived from the "elastic capacity" feature of cloud computing systems.

Search expertise and support

ESaaS service providers can also ensure the best available technical support for shared applications. The major opportunity is to gain access expertise and support on an as needed basis for tasks such as: managing and optimizing your search service using in-depth knowledge of Enterprise Search best practices; analyzing the content to be indexed and recommending actions to leverage the search engine to meet your business objectives in the best possible way; monitoring and tuning the search engine itself for optimum performance; and preparing regular and ad hoc reports for management, along with recommendations for actionable improvements.

Cost sharing
Using ESaaS, the complete search life cycle costs including initial purchases and all ongoing support resources can be included as part of the service cost, thereby providing an opportunity for the customer to:
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Enterprise Search as a Cloud Service

Opportunities for Cutting Costs While Increasing Search Quality By E. Habteselassie & D. Sheppard July 15, 2011

reduce the capital investments that would be required for a dedicated search application and infrastructure; minimize the need for (and overhead of) in-house search processes and expertise; reduce the complexities associated with in-house network security; and potentially share costs across multiple users.

Content Federation
Cloud-based search applications can easily search other websites for relevant information and can combine to form communities with less concern for internal company firewalls and security controls.

Pitfalls To Avoid
As is generally true for any system deployment, there are things to watch out for and pitfalls to avoid with an ESaaS transformation. For example, the following issues are commonly encountered: Moving to cloud environment without expert support leads to customer satisfaction issues. Problems with your existing Enterprise Search system will not be magically eliminated by simply throwing the service over to the cloud environment. Any move to a cloud-based services should be driven by valid and measurable business objectives such as cost savings, productivity improvement, and customer satisfaction. A justification simply to "outsource this service so I can focus on other more important issues" is usually not a valid rationale. Search performance reports still need to be closely monitored and corrective actions taken as necessary, so allocation of company resources to the Enterprise Search service will not automatically go to zero. The line of business managers who are ultimately accountable for search service performance still need to accept the ownership role. In-house procedures for receiving feedback from search reports and for adjusting content structure and metadata to improve search relevancy are required and must be followed.

Next Steps
If an ESaaS provider is available, then ESaaS can be implemented using a very quick process that does not impact any of your existing content infrastructure. The basic steps in an ESaaS deployment project would be: Analyze your requirements - evaluate your business needs, identify content sources, and define the content metadata structure; analyze content volume and search transaction metrics and translate these into a cloud resource requirement specification; Deploy the search application - If necessary (i.e., if not already available as a pre-installed service), install and configure the Enterprise Search application (e.g., Microsoft FAST) on the cloud infrastructure; Develop best practices based search user interaction - leverage the capabilities of the search system to meet the business needs and deliver an interactive and engaging search experience to users;

Enterprise Search as a Cloud Service

Opportunities for Cutting Costs While Increasing Search Quality By E. Habteselassie & D. Sheppard July 15, 2011

Configure secure connectivity to your content - configure the connectivity to various data sources and index content while applying content classification and relevancy ranking business rules; Perform rank tuning and relevancy configuration - before going live to production; and Post-production monitoring - monitor performance and conduct minor trouble shooting as required during the production operation period.

About the Authors:

Efrem Habteselassie
Mr. Efrem Habteselassie is the principal and founder of ACIS Consulting Inc., a Toronto-based information management consulting company since 1992. Mr. Habteselassie has had the opportunity to lead and participate in several large scale enterprise search implementation projects in various industries and government sectors. ACIS is a visionary and innovative company that specializes in development and implementation of leading edge Enterprise Search and Knowledge discovery solutions. ACIS is seeing a growing customer interest in moving their enterprise search applications to a cloud computing environment and is therefore extending its service offering to include ESaaS. Contact: www.acisconsulting.com efremh@acisconsulting.com (416) 439-6579

Donald Sheppard
Mr. Don Sheppard is the principal and founder of ConCon IT Consulting Inc., a Toronto-based IT consulting company since 2002. Mr. Sheppard has been assisting IT managers with standards development, technology assessment and procurement for over 20 years. ConCon IT is currently working with clients to plan the roadmap to Cloud Computing including new models for management. Contact: www.concon.com don@concon.com (416) 581-1667