IT blogging become one of the biggest success platform for all IT Users to communicate, share and collaborate globally. I can’t recall when was the last time I really spend time to read a book that related to IT technology. Most of the time, I will refer to some of the famous and professional IT’s blog to keep myself up to date with IT news and technology changes.

Recently there are many bloggers abuse the influence power they had to miss lead the reader from the blog posts they created. As a blogger, we should always be independent and provide our professional opinion and share about the communities.

I am proud to tell my Friends and Clients that my blog are not sponsor or subsidies by any of the product company. And the group of blogger we have are not relevant to our day to day job. This allow us to be independent and share any opinion we think about. I went through quite a number bloggers website and found the content are purposely bias to certain discussion that commercially benefits to them.They try to miss lead the readers to the direction they can gain benefits.

If I have to blog about something due to financial benefits and not my honest opinion, I will rather not to blog about it at all.  This post is just to share some frustration that I found from some IT blog around the community.

Private Cloud computing had become a key focus in our region started from early this year. Many of the enterprise users are looking into providing IT as a Service to the business unit by adopting to Private cloud computing in their existing IT infrastructure. While Cloud computing become very efficient by offering on demand & utility base computing, self service management and others offering, some of us may had forgotten about the Internal IT operation compliance such as Incident, Problem, Change & Release management as an example. Are we going to revamp the entire process to bring private cloud computing into the environment? I am doubt about this, at least most of the users or client that I met, they will definitely require the compliance to stay on even the move to private cloud computing environment today or tomorrow.

Prior to the cloud computing solution roll out in the enterprise environment, we should spend more time to understand the road map and methodology to ensure the success roll out for the entire solution. Some features or functionality may or may not require to certain environments.

Example 1 : self service provisioning.

How many environments today allow IT users, administrator, applications owners or Business Owner to provision or de-provision without 3rd party involve? All of us may have a different answer on this. At least I had not seen this happen yet in multiple large enterprise environments that I had been worked before.

Self Service provisioning on public cloud may be very useful as we could perform any tasks at anytime without having to engage the 3rd party IT team for execution. But do remember, that is meant for public, which does not require IT support & Compliance as you did in Private base cloud computing. I wouldn’t say Self service are not good in private cloud computing, but you will require to plan, study and analyze further before the decision been made. For earlier adopter on server virtualization, we had gone through the change management processes revamp to manage the server sprawl while the server virtualization been introduced into the Infrastructure previously. By introducing self service provisioning into private cloud computing, I strongly urge you to re-look the IT processes prior to execution before it created another server or infrastructure sprawl.

Example 2: Change Management
How will the Change management process could be integrated to Cloud computing tomorrow? On demand for provisioning & de-provisioning, are tied up together with IT change management processes. More users will be granted with resources creation, manage or decommission. The change management processes require further enhancement to ensure all changes in the infrastructure are documented, review, approve and executed as it does today. Without change management, it will be another operation risk to the entire Cloud Infrastructure.

To summarize this post, I will suggest all of us to re-look into others areas beside technology prior to Cloud computing execution. Choose what you need & what are fit to your environment. Is not all about about what can be done by the technology today, the key success factor for Private Cloud Computing are very much dependent on How you plan, build, execute & operate it.

We all know that the success of the cloud computing environment, is always required consistent, low latency and high speed network that will be provided by the Service Provider. Whether you like it or not, Service Providers are always be part of the IT infrastructure. We had seen many of the service provider are jumping into the cloud computing environment to provide hybrid and public cloud model which offer to everyone across the globe. It happen in NA, EMEA and APAC at the same time.

Mean while, the service provider had realized the business model of cloud computing will be totally different with the normal business they had done before, therefore they often require a strong IT background partnership to provide the technology consultation, venture business strategy and experiences to assure the success of the cloud computing they tried to offer.  NTT had announced to acquire Dimension Data since last week, which clearly state the combination of IT vendor and Service Provider. I believe this combination will allow the service provider to look into cloud computing which offer to the world.  With all this happen, we can clearly see the IT are on the way to turn the infrastructure into the service base model. Combination of IT and Service Provider become closer and closer, which is definitely helpful as both are infrastructure related and it may help to increase the quality of services from time to time. I believe the market is emerging on this area, which we will see more IT vendor partnership with service provider to offer the packages to the client, either with venture business or acquisition.