Best Practices for the Private Cloud
Michael Sullivan-Trainor
Despite all the disruption of cloud, the complexity of its many business and technology models is driving CIOs into the arms of established vendors. This is a key finding from Edge Strategies recent in depth interviews with Fortune 500 CIOs across key industries. The most pressing issue for these executives is resolving the uncertainty about the vision of cloud that will deliver the required business value results. To answer this pressing question, CIOs are turning to large suppliers who can address cloud strategically because they have the combination of enterprise professional services and cross-domain management and implementation skills to understand and carry out the vision.
Key drivers cited by the CIOs are cost reduction or cost avoidance and computing investment utilization. While the early stages of private cloud deliver these benefits through virtualization and automation, the business value is less clear when choosing which cloud model best fits the enterprise. Is it worth the investment to create a robust private cloud or will a managed service provider offer superior ROI? What about public cloud? Are there commodity services that the organization can safely acquire from public cloud providers?
Most CIOs are addressing these questions along two tracks: (1) Strategically what IT model best fits the organization? Public, hybrid or private? Is IT a utility, a secure bastion within a commodity environment, or totally sacrosanct within the walls of its own private infrastructure? (2) Tactically, which applications benefit from which cloud model and how does the organization identify and migrate them? What about security of data and information management?
These are among the questions that lead CIOs into renewed dialogue with large traditional suppliers. Suppliers are expected to have answers from experience solving similar problems across the industry. Despite the clarity of these questions neither suppliers nor most CIOs have developed the ultimate answer. Private cloud remains a joint journey that requires a new level of trust and collaboration between supplier and buyer.
