Cloud Computing Vision

The cloud computing provides real cost savings and agility to its customers in all cloud service models. It helps in the capability of the organisations in their business’s vision.  Whether trying to create a private cloud to better serve internal customers or building a public cloud for an external customer base, there are several key considerations that can be linked to successful cloud initiatives.

              Understand the IT service portfolios, service-level requirements and service costs before building a private cloud service.

              Develop a separate strategic plan for all services under consideration, as well as an analysis against external service offerings.

              Build a private cloud service only after developing a complete business case analysis so that it is all about return on investment, in terms of cost and business value.

              Evaluate and constantly benchmark the solution against external cloud service offerings, and ensure that flexibility is designed in at the onset.

An organisation’s business architecture plays an essential role in determining how cloud should be leveraged to achieve goals and objectives. This business architecture consists of two primary components: the business strategy and the structure utilized to implement that strategy. The business structure defines the core capabilities of the organization and what business processes support those capabilities. For private cloud implementations, the organization is the IT organization of the business whereas for public clouds, the IT organization is the business. For example, an IT organization with the goal of reducing the amount of time is required to procure, provision, and install new hardware systems in order to clarify the concept of strategy and structure components of an organization‘s business architecture. This business goal can be implemented through a consolidation and virtualization strategy revolving the methods and procedures for requesting hardware services from the IT department. The structure employed to support the strategy involves the IT department‘s core capability of providing hardware components to business users, and the process required to provision that hardware.

In order to achieve the result, the business users are expecting IT departments to build the systems necessary to support the business goals and objectives, a tighter alignment between the business and IT is mandated. Enterprise architecture is the link between the business strategy and IT‘s execution of that strategy in the cloud computing. It needs to establish a product portfolio to sell (cloud services), market this portfolio (to internal and/or external users), provide a financial model to charge or recoup costs for services provided, provide customer service for the services it provide, and well as performing all those other activities that a business normally performs.

References:

1. Vision Cloud, http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/ssai/docs/call5-visioncloud.pdf

2. Cloud computing and emerging IT platforms, http://www.few.vu.nl/~kgr700/cloud%20computing%20and%20emerging%20it%20platforms.pdf

3. Lack of cloud computing vision is hurting most enterprises, http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/lack-cloud-computing-vision-hurting-most-enterprises-047