Cloud computing has moved swiftly from being an idea to
being deployed and used at a growing number of companies. As a result, the attention
has shifted from how to implement a cloud environment to how to operate it
effectively.
In majority of cases the companies needed to reinvent their
service delivery models, the organizational processes, roles, and policies. What
is interesting is that most companies have come up with the same basic model. IT industries almost unanimously are looking
to become more responsive to the needs of their clients. They want to make IT a less of an obstruction
to business initiatives, and increase the value it delivers. There seems to have been three common
challenges that most everyone has faced.
1. The need to closely understand and manage the
relationships across IT silos (servers, storage, network domains, etc.); due to
the fact that cloud computing demands a more integrated and holistic approach;
and unfortunately the typical IT groups today lack the organizational structure
and processes to support this approach.
2. The old matter of: resistance to change. Some of the resistance comes from application
developers who are worried about job-security in the cloud-based automation of
daily tasks; and some concerned about the limitations this might place on their
input into technology decisions.
3. The up-keep with the exponential growth of
cloud-computing demands, having direct results on the technology’s success
within the organization.
As we realize, the traditional service delivery models does
not address these challenges and it may even exacerbate the situation. In the
old model, the IT organization is responsible for providing the business with a
complete platform including infrastructure, middleware, tools, and applications
and so on…. Then of course the IT is usually organized to many teams focusing
on their particular component of the platform.
This of course creates silos that delay the cross-domain
integration.
At this point an “IT Business Analyst” works between the IT
and business to deliver the platform to the business. This body is pretty much responsible to
represent the associated needs of the user and work with IT to ensure the delivery
of the services and the correct translation of the needs.
As we all know of course the business requirements are
dynamic, and hence the IT Business Analyst has to compete for attention in a
time-constrained environment, which in turn in itself becomes a bottleneck in
the process.
There is another method which requires no Business Analyst.
Instead the users directly approach IT with their needs. IT then uses a series
of demanding processes to understand and prioritize the overflow of requests. This
creates low-value-added work to IT and limits timely and efficient response to
the user.
So, both methods above in linking IT and User/Business, is
slow in providing solutions. Users are frustrated in not getting what they want
and IT is irritated by the mounting workload and the struggle to keep up.
As a result, these have been the driving force behind the
development of cloud-environment’s new service delivery model that modernizes
the interactions between IT and the user.
The new model includes three primary teams or roles:
•
The IT Cloud Team – being the heart of the
model; usually a group of five or six who act as a COE (Centre Of Excellence)
for cloud skills and knowledge. The team
members are selected from different IT areas, and also are people with
knowledge and experience beyond their core field. This team delivers IaaS (Infrastructure as a
Service) to users. They create virtual
data centres and construct service catalogues and images (Operating system,
networking, storage, security resources), available to users; they also manage
capacity, performance and availability.
•
Super Users – the receivers of the IaaS image;
they are in position to help their peers use the cloud-computing
resources. They can even be a group of
developers familiar with cloud image development. They are actual end-users who have the
technical skills to manage and work with cloud images. They also enhance the
IaaS image into a PaaS (Platform as a Service) image for the business unit use,
in helping their daily work activities. They will add whatever tools are needed
by developers and business team. Once the image is completed, it will go into
the service catalogue. They also allocate capacity within their business unit,
determining the number of virtual machines to allocate to any given platform,
or the number of images to be accessed by users, or how long they can be
accessed, etc….
•
General Users – the consumers of PaaS images;
these are the product developers, customer service engineers and so on,
residing within the business unit who use the platform image to perform their
daily tasks. General Users only interact with Super Users for their needs and
not the IT team.
This model helps the organization overcome their key
challenges with cloud-computing. Hope
this has been of some use.
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