Page 106 - Cloud Essentials

Technologies, such as virtualization, IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS, need to be
understood in order to evaluate their applicability.
Selection and procurement services become important skills. This
includes mapping the requirements of service level agreements (SLAs)

to offerings, negotiating those SLAs and their parameters, and
managing the SLA and contract.
Measurement, monitoring, metering, billing, and reporting form an

important skill set, which derives its relevance from the existence of
shared and potentially externalized resources.
When costs become more variable and more opportunities for trade-
offs between capital and operational expenditures appear, financial
engineering becomes a relevant skill set. This will help in cost

optimization as well as proper chargeback.
Security, access protection, and risk management in the cloud are not
particularly harder in the cloud, just different.

Because new and different skills are required to ensure the successful

adoption of a cloud strategy, new career opportunities evolve as a result.
Some of the job roles will already exist, but cloud adoption will change
how those roles are performed.
IT has traditionally provisioned solutions that meet business needs. With
both public and private cloud solutions, self-provisioning allows quicker
access to computing resources. Private clouds mean that IT must ensure the
appropriate cloud fabric is in place to allow self-provisioning.

Adopting the appropriate level of cloud computing requires a number of
steps to be undertaken. These steps are the critical success factors:

1. The organization must develop a vision of the way cloud benefits are
realized. This vision must be derived from the strategy of the
organization and aligned with the important stakeholders. Without
this vision, any subsequent elaboration will diverge and become

counterproductive.
2. The appropriate operating model for the vision must be designed.
The operating model is a blueprint for the way IT is organized.
Without this model, it will be hard to develop processes that will
work across the entire organization.
3. The vision embodied in the operating model must be executed.

Priorities must be established in order to move from the vision to
things that actually work.

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