Cloud Planning and Design: A road map for success

If you have not yet turned to cloud services, the consideration should be implemented, and there should be no doubt about that. It is expected that by 2015, the global cloud computing market will reach $121 billion trillion, far exceeding 2010 years of 37.8 billion dollars. However, it is very hasty to join the cloud services, the pressure is there, without careful planning to implement may cause trouble in the future.

Cloud projects can be complex for almost any organization, whether the project is a private cloud, a public cloud, or a mixed cloud. While your initial goal may be to create a cloud architecture that meets your current needs, the cloud services you build now must also meet your future business needs. Careful planning is an absolute prerequisite for a successful cloud operation.

So where do we start? It is important to use a simple prescriptive approach for cloud planning and design. Requirements must be mapped to business priorities to ensure that your cloud services meet business goals and increase profitability. The three steps outlined in this article provide a roadmap for your trip to the cloud. On this road, you don't need to be a lone Ranger, the BMC Consulting Service can help you complete this trip.

Three steps of cloud planning and design

Starting with planning and design, the focus is on creating a cloud that meets your business needs. Cloud planning can be divided into three steps:

L Cloud Service Design-design internal and/or external cloud services, define service levels and service level, create service "BOM"

L Cloud Run definition-Define cloud Reference Architecture, design performance and capacity planning, and determine operational compliance and security

• Cloud process business planning-planning requirements and how you will manage cloud service providers, determine service costs and prices, and ensure compliance

Meeting the challenge: a successful strategy

As with any IT initiative, cloud projects are challenging. The following tips will help you eliminate some of the potential pitfalls of this trip.

In the first place, you need to understand why cloud services are implemented. What business goals do you want to meet?

The success of a cloud project requires direction and purpose, or the scope of the project may multiply. Give your business goals a focus. During this trip, don't forget to interact with your customers, as they may have specific requirements for software as a service (SaaS) and want to support their business, which will drive your strategy.

The agency began implementing cloud projects for many reasons. Perhaps you want to get the flexibility of the service virtualization infrastructure to ensure high quality and fast listing. Perhaps you think cloud projects can reduce the number of data centers, increase automation, or reduce deployment time, thereby saving institutional costs. Or the CEO just commissioned the CTO to show a variety of ways to exploit the cloud.

Set Priority

If you try to do everything at once, you may find yourself "boiling the ocean"--in vain, it is impossible to execute a project in such a wide range. The result could be to become a project that costs billions of years to deliver and is almost impossible to support.

Instead, prioritize the duplicate methods you need and allocate enough time for each phase of the project. We strongly recommend that cloud planning and design be divided into three phases.

Phase 1th: Refer to key use cases for IT management in the cloud, plan time-to-market and scale, build a cloud base, and implement infrastructure as a service (IaaS) on a restricted set of technologies. Verify your infrastructure reliability. Do not allow End-to-end integration as a starting point because capacity is limited at this stage.

Phase 2nd: Promoting service portfolio growth, including applications (such as collaborative services), and increasing the number of supported technologies in heterogeneous environments. When capacity surges, ensure that cloud systems are integrated with standard operating processes.

Phase 3rd: Implement service cost control and management, optimize hardware and software infrastructure, and maintain service advantages (such as selecting appropriate management procedures for the right services). Verify that security and compliance are closely monitored with low cost and fast response.

Don't expect the cloud to solve all the problems

Just because you can technically build cloud services does not mean you are entering the cloud of paradise. If organizational, political, or cultural barriers prevent your organization from effectively running, you don't need cloud projects to address these issues. For example, you might have a team running the network, one team responsible for storage, one team managing the server, and another team working on it. If these teams are not collaborating or unwilling to relinquish some control, it is difficult to automate interaction between these functional departments. If you can't break this organizational barrier, you won't be able to solve technical problems. You need to solve these problems before the cloud project succeeds.

Heterogeneous planning

You might think that your first cloud structure should be homogeneous and simple. However, if you follow this idea, when you advance to the 2nd and 3 phases of the project, you will need a larger management platform for larger implementations.

Integrate Services management plan

The cloud does not mean the end of the IT Infrastructure Library (itil®) framework. In fact, cloud management makes the process based on ITIL more important than ever, because the number of requests and changes is increased by 10 times times. Therefore, the key is to correctly report the status of all cloud management activities and component projects in the Configuration Management database (CMDB). You cannot achieve the goals of service management and service level agreements (SLAs) without properly establishing a CMDB. Nor do you manage your desk priorities properly, nor do you have better control over service cost management.

Building capacity to measure service consumption

It is important to measure consumption so that you can provide service cost information. With a range of cloud service access available on the portal site, your customers now believe you have a strong ability to deliver whatever services they need at the highest level of service. Whether the service unit price and the actual service cost are the key elements of their decisions and actions within their budget.

Do not underestimate the role of the service catalog

Defining your services is an important part of cloud planning and design. The service catalog consists of business and technical projects. Because the service is gradually released, it needs a road map. Each project has a lifecycle, and because of this, directory management should have its own process owner and its own responsibility assignment matrix (the responsibility to allocate matrices RAM). The catalog forces you to differentiate between the responsibilities of configuration automation across your IT department and with your IT vendors.

Cloud Planning Checklist

When planning a cloud project, keep the following in mind:

Why Build cloud services?

The cloud planning and design process should be driven by business objectives and given its attention. Always put in the first place why to build cloud services.

What is your long run strategy?

When you go from cloud planning to cloud runtime, think carefully about your strategy. Do you want your team to have full ownership of the cloud services, or do you want to see a third party consulting agency manage the cloud for you?

• What is your service transition mode?

How do you serve new budget proposals in a stable way? How will you transition to a new service?

• What could be the cause of your organization's success?

What data do you collect to measure success? How would you collect it? What is your strategy for getting a return on your investment?

• How will you work on continuous improvement Services (CSI) when you go to the Cloud runtime?

In the planning phase, you should have considered how to make the enterprise transition to the cloud and ensure a mature cloud application, and what measures you will take to improve the service. The services you provide must be consistent with your business expectations. CSI is that you recognize these gaps between the end user's expectations and the services you provide, and then support your adjustment to meet these requirements.

How will you implement the CSI program to improve service quality and accelerate service lifecycle? This includes designing new services, implementing services, measuring and monitoring services, maintaining and improving delivery quality, and acquiring and sustaining institutional inputs. Plan how to achieve your goals from the next day, and you'll have a perfect start to the day.

• What are the compliance requirements for cloud services?

You need to see security compliance and compliance. With security compliance, you can protect the cloud from intrusion and identify people who can access specific areas. Many companies require a strict access system because of the nature of their country or business. For example, some data may be stored in a cloud in a specific geographic area. Other data, such as health or financial information, may have very specific access requirements. These factors have a significant impact on how you plan and run the cloud.

As for compliance, it's easy to think that the cloud will automate and adjust itself as if it were magical. However, cloud services can dramatically increase the number of data center changes-10 to 100 times times. Because of compliance with inspections and regulations, you need to record all changes and report them. Therefore, in the context of setting up a cloud service platform, you must be aware of security and regulatory constraints and take these factors into account when planning, designing, building, and monitoring the cloud.

How the BMC service can help you

The BMC's cloud planning measures are primarily to provide Shinese services, called Cloud Solution planning Workshops (Cloud Solution calculates Workshop). The workshop gathered the BMC architects and subject matter experts, CTO, and key stakeholders from our business unit. Together we make all the necessary requirements, address business challenges and/or gain, prioritize these requirements, and then apply them to prescriptive project planning – a successful roadmap. This process can help your business and IT departments support manageable issues, set the right expectations, and achieve significant results as quickly as possible.

The Cloud Planning workshop does not simply help you determine the fastest and most efficient way to deliver a virtual machine. It helps you view cloud projects in a complete context, including storage, network applications, databases, firewalls, and personnel arrangements. The workshop enables you to refine your goals, check the first class cloud environment, costing models, and the functionality you need. It can also help you refine gap analysis and assess risk, change, and organizational readiness.

During the planning and design process, the following BMC solutions can help you:

• Baseline Discovery Audit (Baseline Discovery Audit)

Leverage our expertise to help identify environments that determine the infrastructure and application equipment.

• Rapid Deployment Cloud (Rapid Cloud Deployment)

Create a cloud-based development environment within a few 30 days.

L Cloud Solution Planning Workshop (Cloud Solution calculates Workshop)

Use the BMC best practices and global engagement experience to work with experts to plan the cloud roadmap.

• Fast results of BMC capacity optimization (Rapid Results for BMC Capacity optimization)

A prescriptive way to manage current and capacity requirements for cloud support.

L BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency mapping activation (BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping activation)

Identify existing workloads and equipment.

Real case

The following enterprises have recognized the great benefits of this approach:

• A large multinational information technology company has adopted scalable solutions to manage capacity and performance, enabling it to quickly identify virtualization applications and understand future capacity requirements. The company has been able to continuously and accurately plan and forecast future capacity requirements, thereby saving resources and reducing server footprint.

• The world's leading software vendors use cloud solutions for their on-demand supply chain management software, enabling them to deliver cloud-based software to their online customers in a matter of hours before it can take weeks or months. This quickly achieves the business value of the company and its customers-creating new revenue.

Conclusion

By leveraging the full breadth of the BMC resources – from unmatched BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management (Cloud lifecycle Management) capabilities to the recognized BMC Consulting Services (Consulting services) expertise-you can develop a dedicated cloud to successfully run the roadmap. With well-designed policies and integrated key IT processes to support your cloud environment, you can ensure that each service meets your business needs and improves management efficiency.

For more information about BMC Cloud planning and cloud design services, visit www.bmc.com/solutions/consulting-services/global-services-for-cloud-computing.html.

Endnote

1. "Cloud Computing market-global Forecast (2010–2015)," marketsandmarkets.com, lag /market-reports/cloud-computing-234.html

Author Introduction

Eric Blum is the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) chief technology officer for the BMC Software, focusing on the implementation of cloud implementations and the commercial value of large BSM deployments across multinational companies.

During the EMEA service vice president of the BMC, Blum provided some project execution support at the CXO level. Prior to joining the BMC, Eric Blum served as mySAP.com solution director for SAP France. Prior to that, Blum worked as an E-commerce executive at Informix, developing an e-business strategy for Informix and facilitating the deployment of the strategy in EMEA.

Alan Chhabra is responsible for cloud consulting implementation of the BMC Software and has over 14 years of experience in helping organizations solve complex IT problems. Prior to joining the BMC, he served in Egenera, responsible for various strategic customer projects for the cloud, utility computing, infrastructure virtualization, building Dynamic Data centers, and managing the Egenera professional services team. Chhabra was a consultant to Ernst and Stark and obtained a Master of Engineering scholarship at Charles Draper Labs laboratory. He graduated from MIT with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical engineering and a master's degree in aerospace engineering.

About the BMC

The business line is in it. It is on the BMC.

Today, more than 25,000 organizations in more than 120 countries worldwide rely on the BMC software to manage their business services and applications in distributed environments, host environments, virtualized environments, and cloud environments. These include the global Fortune 100 giants, including small businesses. As the business Services management platform, Cloud management leader and the industry's most comprehensive IT management solution provider, BMC helps customers save costs, reduce risk, and achieve business goals. The BMC's total revenue was about $2.2 billion in the four quarter ending March 31, 2012. For more information about the BMC software (NASDAQ:BMC), please visit http://www.bmc.com/

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(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)