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Cloud
June 5, 2020
In the previous blog ‘Making Cloud Onboarding Hassle-Free and Valuable’, we looked at the security and governance related concerns of cloud onboarding. Now let us deep dive into cloud managed and ITSM based processes.
The key word to describe the challenge is ‘scale’. Operating cloud at scale and in a multi-cloud world is only possible with automation. Otherwise, the complexity will result in a scaling of the operations team and that is counterproductive to the aims of efficiency, speed and cost saving.
Do you need a cloud management layer or can your existing management ecosystem cope with the different clouds? Probably you will see a mix.
Cloud services drive or in some cases mandate a different behavior. Cloud management helps in enabling your operations teams to monitor and document to provide the required input. Acting on that input to nurture a new behavior is a challenge that goes beyond the onboarding discussion.
Part of the onboarding exercise is to ensure that the ITSM processes in place are being used and that cloud behaves like a natural ingredient to the IT ecosystem.
The most obvious processes in the ITSM realm are incident, problem and change management. Establishing ticket tool connections, alignment of expectations (response times, solution times, escalation routes, etc.) are activities that are obvious and at least partially covered in the contractual and technical onboarding of the tool ecosystem.
But there are more processes to look at. Let me pick just one combination Capacity Management / Demand Management. While the cloud world seems simple from a commercial point of view – it is all pay per use – the truth is far from it. On demand vs reserved, capacity bands, billing mechanics, etc. can make a huge difference to the bottom-line number on the bill. In addition, you want to avoid hitting the ceiling of a contract the moment you need new capacity urgently.
There is a lot to learn and adjust when stepping into the cloud space and getting the team and the processes / process integration prepared as a part of your onboarding activities.
This first step into cloud onboarding has shown that there are many aspects in many different areas to consider. These cloud onboarding best practices should help you to get onboarding under control.
Having started with a statement that “it is time for some emergency braking”, we can now safely say it is time to start the engines, get the foot off the brake and get cloud onboarding done in a managed and controlled way.
Part 1: How to onboard a cloud solution provider
Part 2: The foundations of hooking up to a cloud provider
About the Author
Matthias Popiolek
Matthias has more than 20 years of IT experience. He is dedicated to Cloud services fulltime since 2007. He has a unique set of experiences in areas including consultancy management through portfolio management, creation of cloud products, and classic data center delivery. Matthias is focused on enterprises adopting “modern delivery” as a standard way of working. In doing so, he works with customers on strategy, organization, processes and technology.
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