As promised, here are the ten steps to an effective private cloud strategy:
Effective Leadership: From vision to execution, getting buy-in from various stakeholders and alignment with the business, clearing hurdles and driving cultural change.
Definition of Services: What are the services that are provided, their required SLAs and the current SLAs. Determine service costs and their required skills.
Evaluation of Alternatives: Is moving to the cloud the right approach? Generally speaking, non-standard and customized systems are not suitable in the cloud.
Creation of Metrics: Metrics of economics, quality and agility of service need to be created both from an IT operations as well as a service user's perspective.
Development of business case: In a recent survey at the Gartner DC conference, 55% of respondents thought agility/speed is the main driver to move into a private cloud. Only 21% responded that cost was a main driver.
Development of people plan: Communications, organizational structure, career paths, performance evaluations are necessary components of the people plan.
Development of business management plan: Strategy and planning of the move, funding model, service development, reporting etc. are main components of the business management plan.
Development of technology plan: Investment protection, fabric selection (compute, storage, network, etc.), vendor partnerships, interoperability aspects need to be addressed in this plan.
Development of operational process plan: DevOps and cloud computing model, dynamic operations, customized services are major components of this plan.
Start small, think big: Build-in learning and proactive expansion into the equation.
As I mentioned earlier, these are nothing new. But nevertheless, it serves as a good checklist when developing a private cloud migration strategy.
About Me
- Sree Sundaram
- Sree Sundaram is currently a Sr. Director of Enterprise Architecture at a major global technology firm. He is currently engaged at two major international biotechnology firms in optimization and migration of infrastructure from their current platform to a newer technological platform that is in line with their current and future business needs. Sree has solid experience in understanding the needs of both middle and top level management and has the ability to communicate at both levels. He is fundamentally aware that the transactional and short-term needs of middle level management are different from the long-term vision of top-level management. He has successfully dealt with such issues by providing an IT framework that meets both the short term and long term needs. In general, Sree helps to prioritize competing initiatives using a combination of his acumen, communication skills, strategic and operation plans.