So your company has decided to embrace the private cloud? That is a good first step, but it is important for companies, and especially IT professionals, to know why they are embracing the cloud. There needs to be a reason for your company to invest in a private cloud; and to determine the reason the IT team needs to determine what problems they are facing and how IT can help solve them.
Once a reason has been established IT professionals then need to work on building the cloud infrastructure. Gartner has suggested these 10 elements to help make a private cloud successful:
- Leadership: it is critical to have a leader who understands the needs of the business and IT department.
- Define your services upfront: the IT department needs to understand the services that the business offers so that they can create strategies to solve problems.
- Evaluate alternatives: research to find the solutions that will add value to your company.
- Create metrics: it is important to create metrics to test your progress in the cloud. These metrics can include: cost, customer satisfaction, speed of delivery, etc.
- Build a business case for using the cloud: determine what parts of your company could best benefit from the cloud and expand from there.
- Develop a people plan: the roles of your IT workers will change so be ready to work with them through the change.
- Have a management plan: the future of IT will include using multiple services, for example a hybrid cloud. Therefore it is important to have a management plan for these changes.
- Have the right technology in place: business processes are important, but that doesn’t mean that technology can be ignored. Having the right technology in place might be just as crucial.
- Mind the processes: Always look ahead to what’s next and be ready to evolve.
- Start small, think big: learn by experimenting and don’t try to do everything in the beginning.
Are these 10 elements to building a private cloud ripe? Or are they hype?
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