As the enterprise seeks to deploy private Cloud infrastructures, the internal roles of IT are changing. As provides of IT services, it’s only natural that internal operations will find itself taking on the role of a service provider.
As the duties for managing IT operations evolve, the article, “Lessons from service providers on private cloud,” provides some recommendations from service providers around managing private Clouds:
- Self-Service Portals: As the private Cloud is run more like a service model, IT will become more of a provisioning portal for customers to purchase and implement new services.
- Automation: Because today’s consumers expect on-demand services, service automation is critical to guaranteeing quality service delivery and lowering costs.
- Chargeback: Applying chargeback models can establish metrics for tracking and attributing service and resource consumption to better understand computing usage and costs.
- Monitoring, Management & Transparency: A holistic view of the entire IT enterprise -- including both physical and Cloud-based resources -- is essential for guaranteeing service delivery.
By now, it is well established that private Clouds (or Cloud computing, in general) bring a host of new management challenges with them. Service based infrastructures require not only internal visibility but also external access to services and key metrics.
Because many of these new functions are essential to managing private Clouds, enterprise providers need to continue to look to at the model service providers are adopting for lessons learned and best practices.
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