Building a Cloud Strategy, and Getting Your IT Team On Board

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

There’s very little argument that WAN technologies have helped shape many organizations now do business. Self-service and data delivery over the Internet, referred to as cloud computing, is helping organizations grow organically, while still keeping costs stable. With increased bandwidth and better technology behind the cloud, this solution can be a powerful tool for any business.

Cloud Options

But what type of deliverables does the cloud really offer? Disaster Recovery, Backup, Test/Dev and other capabilities of the cloud have helped create an interesting solution set for organizations to choose from. Aside from just knowing what the cloud can offer, organizations and managers must be able to explain the benefits of the cloud in a top-down model. This means that if managers know the end goals of a cloud strategy, while the engineering staff is left clueless, the success of the entire project can be limited. The main goal here is to understand the various solutions that the cloud can bring to an organization, and how to show these benefits to the entire IT team…

The power of the cloud lies in its versatility. With more resources available to the average user, cloud computing is capable of delivering more content faster, and to more devices. There are many ways to utilize the cloud and each can have its own considerations and best practices. The very first planning point is to select the appropriate cloud model:

• Private. This is where an organization elects to host their equipment and present a cloud model that is managed and controlled by the internal IT team. Resources – physical and virtual – all belong to the organization.
• Public. An organization may choose to work with an outside cloud provider for their hosting needs. Applications, servers and workloads are all provisioned from resources owned by a third-party provider. This is a good example of a “pay-as-you-grow” model.
• Hybrid. This is a combination of a public and private cloud model. Sometimes an organization may choose to have a part of their environment hosted internally, while other components are given to a third-party provider…

Read more from source @ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/09/05/using-the-cloud-to-deliver-business-solutions-and-getting-your-it-team-on-board/