I going to talk about some of the expectations and realities about private clouds.
Expectation #1: CAPEX to OPEX conversion.
Reality: As soon as someone hears "Cloud Computing" everyone jumps to conclusion that it's CAPEX to OPEX conversion, however it's not true if you plan to operate it yourself.
- It is partially true if you are going to external vendor and get a Virtual Private Cloud. Because you might have to upgrade your network infrastructure to first enable access to virtual machine and then buy a bigger pipe to have your staff to have smooth access.
- And if you are building your own private cloud then you will have a huge upfront CAPEX to buy the equipment. You can start with your existing low-grade equipment but that increases your maintenance cost.
Expectation #2: Operation Management will become easier.
Reality: There is an additional overhead on you current operations team because you will not get rid of you existing physical hardware on day one and it will be phased out over time. So the cost of training the ops staff and moreover, willingness to learn, of the ops staff can be really tricky yo manage.
Expectation #3: Charge back to Business will enable IT to become profit-center.
Reality: The reality is that as soon as you ask any business unit that you will need to start charging back, they will ask for SLAs, that mean additional cost for IT. The fact that IT will have to provision for increased capacity all the time, hence there will always be CAPEX at regular intervals. Hence the IT will always remain as cost-center, however it will be come agile and better equipped to support business.
Expectation#4: Executives will quickly/easily fund the initiative.
Reality: This is the mistake even we made as team when we started out to create private cloud. You need to get buy-in from the various business heads before you submit the business case. If they don't agree for charge back, you business case is going to fail. Also, if you are building your own private cloud, be prepared to answer," Why not Amazon/Azure/etc..?"
The bottom line is that you need to be fully aware of what you are getting into. Also refer my other blog on what challanges to expect while operating on cloud environment.
