By Khalid Hakim
This is one of the common questions that I keep getting from my clients when building IT operations transformation roadmaps. In fact, one of the key considerations of a transformation roadmap is the business management side of your cloud, which often gets deprioritized by key stakeholders.
Let’s think it through: Can you tell me on the spot what your total cloud spend is, and, what that spend is comprised of? Here’s another one: What’s the cost for you to deliver a unit of infrastructure as a service (IaaS)? And what about your consumers: Who consumes what service and at what cost?
Can you identify the services used and the cost allocation for each service? How is your cost efficiency compared to that of other public cloud infrastructures? How can you use that type of information to optimize the cost of your existing and future operations? How can you create a showback report to each of your stakeholders?
Let’s say that you’re the VP of Cloud Infrastructure — think through how you would justify your data center investments. Have you proactively analyzed demand vs. capacity along with operations cost of your cloud services? How can you scale dynamically to fulfill your consumer needs? Have you thought about your goal to optimize the cost of delivering cloud services? Don’t you need closer monitoring to the quality of your delivery, such as continuous analysis and improvement?
(I can hear you thinking, enough with the questions already…)
If you are the IT financial manager, imagine how you can reduce your long-term commitments by moving from CAPEX to OPEX if appropriate. With financial and business management capabilities, your planning and IT budgeting would be based on actual cloud service demand and consumption practices. You would also be able to leverage benchmarking and “what if” scenarios for your cloud service costing optimization opportunities.
What keeps CIOs awake at night during a cloud implementation is the challenge of how they will demonstrate and deliver value for the cloud investment, as well as contribute as an innovator to the business by dynamically supporting growth and transformation as a result of their cloud cost optimization.
In fact, your ability to respond at the speed of business through fact-based decision making and responsiveness to changing needs in a dynamic environment is key to your success. The transparency of your cloud delivery value in context of demand, supply, cost, and quality will help improve your alignment with business goals to cloud services delivered.
In my next blog, I’ll cover some of the built-in functionality and business disciplines of the VMware IT Business Management Suite that can help you succeed in your cloud delivery and accelerate time to value.
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Khalid Hakim is an operations architect with the VMware Operations Transformation global practice. You can follow him on Twitter @KhalidHakim47.
Check out the VMworld 2014 Operations Transformation track for opportunities to hear from experienced VMware experts, practitioners, and the real-world experiences of customers transforming their IT infrastructure and operational processes.
