If you ask ten CIO’s what Cloud Computing means, you’re likely to get ten different answers. They won’t be wildly different, but still, two years after the term was coined, no one can agree on a single definition. And I’m not going to try here. I’ll leave the definition and classification of cloud to the pundits who have more time.
The one thing that is certain about cloud computing is the hype. There’s lots of it. I spend a lot of time talking with customers about cloud, and so often, they’re focused on the “what.”
“What is it?”
“What do I need to get started?”
“What will I save?”
“What will I spend?”
Instead, they should be asking how. This is the question that helps you plan.
“How do I do it right?”
“How are my service levels being managed?”
“How do I maintain my right to choose?”
“How do I protect my investment now and in the future?”
I’ll address many of these questions in future blog posts, but for now, I want to leave you with a quick anecdote that illustrates the importance of planning.
About a year ago, I was talking to the CIO at one of our larger customers. At the time, he viewed external cloud providers like Google and Amazon as competitors to his IT organization. As the story goes, someone in accounting noticed nearly 60 corporate card transactions between company employees and Amazon. It turns out that the developers in a line of business weren’t buying Kindles or DVDs. They where using EC2 for some of the projects that they did not have capital budget for. The Amazon model allowed the developers to get what they wanted without having to go through IT.
The CIO’s first concern was data privacy. The lack of controls might have put the company at serious risk. As he was considering a policy to ban all external access to public clouds, he received a request from the line of business head and his CFO to compare the cost of internal services to those provided externally by Amazon. Apparently his customers loved the experience of provisioning servers in minutes and the pay as you go model.
The CIO could not face the LOB head and the CFO to defend why it took six weeks to provision a server nor the inability to maximize the use of IT resources. To help the company get most out of their technology investments and better enable the business, the CIO implemented a few changes.
The company now has very clear guidelines for when to use external vs. internal clouds, and service providers like Amazon are now viewed as an important and powerful extension of their IT environment.
Additionally, the company established a “service catalog” for IT services. They are integrating their request management system with automation workflows that enable them to provision virtual server instances in their datacenter or in a public cloud. This way IT is the front end for all service requests including the ones that would be provisioned externally.
As I’m thinking back on the conversation, I can’t help but wonder what might have been avoided had the simple question of “how” been asked along the way.
“How can we manage a hybrid cloud environment?”
“How do we put people and processes first?”
Remember, when it comes to the cloud, it pays to plan ahead.
Speaking of planning ahead, remember to write down which floor you parked your car at the airport.
The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.
