The cloud hype has been with us for some time now, producing new concepts such as private cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud. For most companies, however, embarking on a cloud strategy has been cloaked in a mysterious cloud of confusion and complexity, says Sarel Naude, Senior Solutions Consultant at Ubuntu Group.
Today, data centres are at a very critical junction; they are caught between ever-changing business requirements while at the same time need to take into account the constraints imposed by legacy applications and infrastructure.
A private cloud, which is defined, controlled and serviced by internal IT resources, can be built from both internal and external IT infrastructure. This environment can be operated as a service and must enable your transformation from a legacy IT organisation to a strategic business partner within the organisation.
Accelerating your adoption of a private cloud requires a transformational approach to current IT principles. Cloud architectures require changes in traditional architectural foundations at infrastructure levels, application levels, network levels and storage resources.
Traditional approaches of creating isolated physical configurations where services are bound and tied to specific hardware configurations need to be shattered. Resources (CPU, memory, storage and networking) all need to be pooled and must be dynamically provisioned at the enterprise level.
The big issue most CIOs and IT managers struggle with is "How ready are we really for the cloud? How can we put together a roadmap to the cloud that is based on fact and is specific to our unique environment?"
To assist with these challenges, we offer a Cloud Readiness Assessment, which is a "fast-track" engagement solution, with immediate value and actionable deliverables for any IT organisation. It will accelerate the organisation's transformation strategy towards cloud computing.
The assessment leverages a proven methodology to examine an organisation's maturity along nine fundamental characteristics of cloud computing:
* Cloud organisational readiness
* Cloud-ready infrastructure
* Data protection for cloud computing
* Multi-site cloud technologies
* Automation/orchestration for cloud environments
* Trust/compliance in a cloud delivery model
* Cloud services/chargeback
* Cloud applications readiness
* End-user computing for cloud
We will guide the participants of the assessment through a set of guided workshops designed to build a personalised cloud maturity model describing the existing and desired readiness state of your IT environment. This will assist organisations to plot the route required to journey to the cloud and reduce the risk involved in embarking on this journey.
For more information, visit www.ubuntusa.co.za.
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