This is my talk I gave last week at Cloud Connect in Santa Clara. One slide that did not make the deck are the top reasons why people struggle with building private clouds
- Management and operations process.
- Culture
- Funding Model
- Service description and self-service interface
As my deck says, "I got 99 problems, but the tech ain't one"
Enabling IT as a Service -Cloud Management and Orchestrationfrom
Cisco Data Center Building a "real" cloud involves the following success factors
- Well articulated corporate strategy with phases (crawl, walk, run)
- Engage existing automation teams for skills
- Well-defined, achievable service definitions that are automatable, volume
- Platform that does not lock into a specific hypervisor or cloud API
- A team that is trained (with specific roles) on the solution so that they can extend it in combination with the vendor's services organization
- Get into production ASAP to drive value and organizational learning
- Union of OOB features and specific configurations for your environment.
- Articulated strategy for integrating with certain existing/deployed IT assets, and using the new "Cloud" as a way to shed IT baggage
- Recognition that your Cloud Management Platform is extensible to other areas in the IT strategy and that partner products may be necessary as well
- Have a suite / framework so you can maintain in the long term. And use external resources
- Need clear articulation of career paths once you start removing "button pushers." design, operations, not implementation
- Focus on process outcomes, not process activities. Or end up with innefficient processes