A large distributed public agency with over 10,000 users wanted to offer its technology solutions and capabilities to other agencies within the country. To achieve this goal, they embarked on a transformation initiative to become a cloud service provider using VMware Cloud Foundation™.
While the agency’s IT team could deploy VMware Cloud Foundation on their own, they didn’t have the depth of expertise to quickly:
- integrate it with their existing systems and process for ease of management
- build out the high-value automation needed to provide easy access to their customers
- create the cloud IT roles needed to create, manage, and sustain the services
This isn’t an uncommon scenario which is why the agency enlisted the help of VMware Professional Services. Even though VMware Validated Solutions can guide customers in deploying VMware Cloud Foundation, they need the breadth of experience and expertise to build a well-architected solution that is fully integrated with their broader ecosystem.
Integrating with existing systems
VMware Professional Services built, configured, and customized the solution to integrate with the agency’s existing and third-party tools. This included capacity management to define t-shirt sizes for provisioning new VMs, CMDB, DevOps CI/CD pipelines, and ticketing tools. We integrated VMware Cloud Foundation with their resource monitoring tools enabling them to track and right-size VMs below a certain usage threshold.
The agency wanted to offer standardized services to their customers. To build out their cloud services portfolio and self-service catalog we helped identify their specific requirements, objectives, and service lifecycle and identified which teams and roles would need access. We then helped them define the service features, capabilities, purposes, intended users, specifications, and dependencies. For example, they needed to have security and architectural compliance integrated into the services. We built cloud templates to meet those requirements, allowing the security and architecture teams to proactively monitor the new environment. SLAs and policies were established for access control, data handling, and usage guidelines for each service. We created their self-service catalog for ease of navigation and integrated it with ServiceNow to open tickets and request resources for automated provisioning.
Defining a cloud operating model
Although the IT team was well-versed and comfortable managing the virtual infrastructure for internal consumption, they were unfamiliar with how to adapt roles and processes to support a cloud operating model. Their previous operational structure didn’t have established roles for managing the cloud offerings and service catalog. We helped them define a cross-functional cloud platform team and the processes needed for managing the new environment encompassing security, architecture, capacity management, and operations.
A key role was the customer-focused portfolio manager responsible for managing the service catalog and serving as the liaison between the business, consumers, and cloud platform team. Another essential role we helped them define was the cloud product owner who defines and manages the service offerings and is responsible for all the front-end, back-end, and middle layer applications.
We integrated VMware Cloud Foundation with their existing processes and procedures which required extensive customization to support their objectives. As a result of our work, the agency now operates as a cloud service provider with a customer-focused mindset. They have a deeper understanding of how to support and anticipate customer needs.
Delivering cloud services with confidence
From the agency’s perspective, the service provider approach required them to operate with a new mindset. The team learned technical skills and a new way of building the cloud services that their customers actually want. With the knowledge gained they can now independently create the services, processes, and procedures and effectively manage and consume the environment.
Learn how VCF Professional Services can help with your cloud initiatives by contacting your VMware Sales Representative.
