Pipes are creaking, the roof is leaking, there’s lead in the paint and asbestos in the walls. Do you build the dream house, rent that modern condo, or do you pick out a manufactured home online? Either way, once you move into your new home, all your problems are solved, or are they?
Even after you move into the perfect residence, the one with ‘new house smell,’ your old issues always come along for the ride. Your daughter’s friend still knows that she keeps a house key hidden under the backdoor matt. Your son’s hockey team still comes over after the game to raid the refrigerator. The heating, electric, security, and tax bills also don’t care if you rent or own. And garbage day is always with us.
Moving to a new home doesn’t instantly end the unique aspects and character of how you and your family live day-to-day.
No matter where you go, there you are.
This is true of home life and the application life cycles. Running a family or running enterprise applications in the data center or the cloud.
It also reveals part of the path to building a world-class technology practice.
Your lifestyle at home, and your workload policies in the cloud, can be more essential than the underlying house or technical infrastructure. Policy debt is like all those issues that are unique to our lives or business. They won’t go away even if we change homes or neighborhoods, data centers or clouds.
In ‘Cloud Is’ – Part Four – Technical Debt I wrote about how resolving technical debt may not provide the highest value to the IT team or the business. This is the classic struggle where the urgent displaces the important. Resolving policy debt has a direct connection to value creation. I don’t mean just taking out the friction between business and IT. What is also critical is being able to ensure that everything is in place for your applications and your organization to continue to operate efficiently while continuing to innovate. Within every IT environment, there lurks unaddressed or unknown network misconfigurations, over-provisioned databases, latency, cost, compliance, performance, and security issues.
Not knowing the current state, and knowing how to remediate these issues, before they are an issue, is only half of the reason why IT organizations fail to mature into world-class centers of excellence.
The other half of the story is being able to create new policies that are not only visible to the whole team, but also applicable to existing and future environments.
If your teams know how their efforts uniquely contribute to your organization’s success, that is the game-changer.
How does a busy IT organization double the time they spend on creating radically efficient existing and new services if they can leapfrog over their technical debt?
Across both the vRealize and CloudHealth product portfolios, you will find powerful discovery and remediation functionality that will help you to identify and correct Policy Debt. This is how we are helping industry-leading IT organizations elevate their role from solely addressing technical debt.
But in some organizations, there’s a bigger problem that Policy Debt. What if the hockey team never raids the fridge, even when invited?
We’ll discuss this next in: ‘Cloud Is’ – Part Six – Consumption Debt
The full ‘Cloud Is’ series is available here: https://blogs.vmware.com/management/author/rquerin
Functionality in vRealize Suite that discovers, and helps you manage and resolve Policy Debt:
https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2020/05/roi-dashboard-for-vrealize-operations-8-1.html
https://www.vmware.com/products/vrealize-network-insight.html
https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2019/04/onboard-workloads-cloud-automation-services.html
