You’ve been tasked with coming up with a private cloud strategy for your company. Where do you start? After knowing why you’re interested in the cloud in the first place, there’s a key next step that can’t be ignored.
“My best advice to you during the whole presentation is you’ve got to be very aware of what is going to mark your success,” said Eduardo Kassner during his Tuesday morning TechEd session, “Best Practices for Building Your Strategy for a Private Cloud.”
The Microsoft architect surveyed more than 100 organizations that are either currently deploying or planning to move to a private cloud. Almost 70 percent of the companies had projects that were stuck in the design or exploratory phase, likely because they couldn’t determine the ROI of moving forward. He found that 90 percent of projects didn’t have new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), goals and measurements that help define what makes a project a success.
“You need to have a measurement of success. I cannot state that enough.”
Kassner also stressed that you need to know what you’re good at and what you’re bad at, and that there’s a certain level of operational maturity that needs to exist before considering a move to the cloud. For example, “If you configure your servers manually, no cloud for you,” he said. “If you don’t have a process defined, no cloud for you.”
So, you need to define your capabilities and limitations. But what if you aren’t sure how to identify them? Kassner recommends visiting Microsoft.com/optimization and completing a self assessment using Microsoft’s cloud analysis tool. It will help you find your organization’s gaps and ask, “What do you want to take to the cloud and why?” More importantly, it will also ask you “Why not?” To succeed, you need to find the things that will stop you from going to the cloud as much as you need to determine what the cloud can do for you.
Watch the video below for a tour through what the cloud analysis tool looks like:
Says Kassner, “It’s not about the tools, but the capabilities.”
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