Cloud Architect reorganizing IT organization in Activision

How can new IT industry win friends or gain influence?

"It's not in front of your job title to have a ' cloud ' word," says Rick Parker, the current Activision Cloud architect, the creator of a video game called Deriving and Guitar Hero.

Activision, a 4000-person corporate headquarters located in Santa Monica, Calif. Parker, the company's first cloud architect, reports directly to the vice president of the IT Operations department that reports to CTO.

Less than two weeks into his job, he discovered that Activision's traditional IT organization that separates services, networks, and storage teams, like most IT departments, has not reached a consensus on cloud computing.

"The biggest challenge will be to turn traditional IT organizations into cloud institutions," he said. As the company's first to face these challenges, these challenges have not yet been counted as the training of in-house staff on cloud computing.

The company's initial idea was to shift as many applications as possible to a shared cloud to reduce spending. But in the opinion of the in-house staff, the cloud is always cheaper than the private cloud, according to Parker, which is wrong.

"They've heard too much hype that private and private cloud storage isn't really cloud computing," he said. "Now they have a bad impression of cloud computing." Most of Parker's job is to inform the team about the latest technology standards that meet cloud computing.

There is also a concern among employees that applying cloud models will change or even replace their work. In some ways their concerns are right, Parker said. "If you can use automation to improve management efficiency, you need fewer administrators ... This is understandable concern. ”

In any case, his goal is to make every person on the team a cloud administrator. They will be running the entire virtual data center, not a single technology, he said. Parker intends to get rid of the configuration of routing and switching based on command line, instead of using management tools. He expects to familiarize everyone with the training through cross-training and then form a cloud team that includes people from all departments.

In addition to these, Parker has to choose the most cost-effective for each workload in a variety of cloud computing (shared, private or mixed)-he assesses these costs with cost modeling tools. The Activision company has about 60 to 100 applications, including Windows applications on different versions of Windows servers, depending on the office.

That said, Activision already has 15 game studios, each with its own data center and it essentials, and, like other Activision companies, acquisitions not only acquire different IT solutions but also have greater challenges. Parker's goal is to standardize the basic it functionality as much as possible. He is in Los Angeles, Supernap, Switch Communications ' massive data center to search host hosting scheme.

His strategy is to start with a simple application, just as the contract and schedule software for email, a service application, immediately increases productivity and lowers costs. He's going to build conceptual validation, and let the company understand all aspects of cloud computing, like self-service security. "Cloud computing will be easier to implement when they see the benefits he brings," he said.

"It will be more about people than technical issues," Parker added, adding: "I need more courage to convey these ideas." ”

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)