In building your private cloud, there are many trade-offs and determinants that must be considered. In working with customers, I’ve identified the main five that go into any companies decision criteria: Agility, Efficiency, Standards, Governance, and Security.
Agility – Key to all decisions is “how do I create agility for the organization”. How empowered do I want to make other departments to stand up applications or gain access to compute resources. Recognizing that if I don’t create the avenue for greater agility for the business, the business will gain it through additional avenues.
Efficiency – At the very least, I’m trying to do more with my IT infrastructure with less. Creating greater operational efficiency, just for my IT organization, enables me to offer greater agility for the business.
Standards – Do I have the manpower and expertise to adopt open standards, or do I prefer the conveniences of established OS like VMWare or Microsoft? Open standards can provide lower cost licensing, but do I pay more to get the expertise in house when I’ve already invested money and training for the established players.
Governance – On top of everything, I want control. I want to provide for agility, I want to maintain efficiency, but ultimately, I have to manage IT. Who has access, how they get access, what they have access to ultimately needs to reside in my domain.
Security – I want to support the businesses need to move at the speed of web, but I need to understand the trade-offs from different clouds and where my data lies. Security probably sits at the top of IT’s interest, but is off less concern to the departments. They assume it’s taken care off. But security ultimately falls on IT.
The value and importance of each lever will differ for each company. Understanding these levers and their respective trade-offs will be key in building our private cloud.
Enterprise Cloud 