Managing the cloud

How to manage cloud computing as part of an overall IT strategy

Automation

A key factor in successfully managing the cloud is removing managers and staff from IT management processes — in other words, automating as much of the cloud as possible. “Once you have people involved in any process, it doesn’t survive the journey to the cloud because the cloud is dynamic and you don’t have the time in the day to continually change this as they happen,” marketing CTO for EMC ANZ, Clive Gold, says.

Likewise, application migration — a physical to virtual (P2V) process — should also be fully automated to include correct placement, high availability needs, fault tolerance and automated disaster recovery should be an integral part of any cloud implementation.

For hybrid public-private cloud, an automated approach to chargeback is also essential, according to VMware’s Di Pietrantonio.

“If an organisation elects to run in a private cloud for six months, then move into the public cloud for the next six months, there should be some automated process to correctly calculate the various loads and consumption rates of a particular service,” he says. “It shouldn’t need to manually generate charging invoices; the data consumed is already captured by the environment. Another example is disaster recovery.”

The benefit of automation is the IT managers can stop managing resources and focus on the IT service delivered to end users. “You can then ask questions around how IT reports to end users, how you can offer a service catalogue, how you can show end users what you’re doing,” EMC’s Gold says. “After that, you can then think about whether you want to provide the service yourself, look to an external provider to deliver it cheaper than you can yourself, or do a combination of the two.”

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