Key Metrics for your Cloud

Both Cloud Consumers and Cloud Service Providers are looking to reduce costs, optimize the services and further their business goals. In order to achieve these, they need to focus on several key metrics:

Time to Market (Cloud Providers): Time is crucial in the highly competitive Cloud Service Provider industry. The time to market is a make / break factor in any cloud deal. The turnaround time for IT resources to be provisioned enables new services and products to be deployed faster than traditional IT and this is a critical success metric for any cloud service provider. Time & Effort required for provisioning a cloud service / resources is of utmost importance to an organization and is also a concern for cloud service providers.Reducing the time & effort to provision a service results in reducing the burden on IT staff thereby resulting in a reduced cost of the Service.

Utilization of Physical Resources: In traditional data centers, a lot of physical resources are under utilized. Cloud based data centers make use of automated workload management & virtualization techniques that help organizations get better ROI on their investments. From a Service Provider perspective, this helps them to maximize and optimize the usage of their resources.

Retirement of the Cloud Services: Proper service management enables organizations and service providers to have an end date to the services to help them manage, plan and budget the resources. In traditional IT data centers, people tend to "forget" services if they don't use it for a while.

SLA Management: This is the basis of tiered support of services in the Cloud. Service Level Agreements allow the services to be deployed by classifying them for uptime & failover parameters.High priority services obviously cost more to support and will be expensive. If your users expect lower service levels - eg. DEV / QA environments, go for lower SLA levels to reduce cost.

Admin - Server Ratio: A key metric for both the cloud consumers and service providers is the Admin to Server ratio. This demonstrates the optimization capabilities of the provider and the lower it is, the more cost benefits the customer can expect. Automation tools, workflows and workload management helps to reduce this ratio.

Predicting Service Costs: A key metric to look for is whether you can predict & trend your service costs. This can help organizations to predict demand, plan capacity and manage costs.

Apart from the above, there are many other factors & metrics that you can look out for based on your organization needs.

Also posted on BMC Communities.

Cloud Implementation Best Practices

Here are some of the key best practices that I have learned over a period of time for running a Cloud Implementation. Enjoy your Cloud!


Form a Cloud Initiative Team & a Cloud Champion
The first step in your vision to have a successful Cloud Implementation is to form a Cloud Initiative Team, some people refer to it as a "Tiger Team"! This team should comprise of key Business Stakeholders, a Cloud Architect, Vendor / Partners of the project and key technical IT resources who will drive the project, evaluate Cloud technologies and help to define the business strategy around Cloud Adoption. Another important thing to do is to designate a Cloud Champion - a "go to guy" for everything related to the Cloud project including working as a liaison between various teams & the Cloud Initiative Team.

Build a Parallel Cloud Environment from Ground Up
A lot of organizations try to add on the cloud infrastructure to their current behemoth IT infrastructure and let it grow to be a big white elephant! Avoid this pitfall...Try and build a parallel Cloud Environment from ground-up. This gives you a chance to break free from the traditional mindset & processes & gives you the ability to experiment & explore. This will lower the barriers to entry for your IT Admins & Users and create a wall between your Revenue Generating environment and the new Cloud Environment. This also helps in your learning experience and avoids costly mistakes that can impact your revenue stream.

Simple Hardware & Software Standards
Avoid a complicated hardware / software spread. Try to keep focus on a single technology stack which is simple & will satisfy 80% of your users. For e.g. bring in virtualized x86 servers running Windows or Linux. The more complicated your environment is, the more technical resources you will need to administer and more chances of failure!

Bring in Existing Shadow Cloud Users
There is a possibility that there are multiple business / IT users internally who are using the Cloud (Amazon EC2, Google etc) without the knowledge of the IT Management teams. Rope in these users to adhere to policies & processes that the Cloud Initiative Team has worked on to increase their adoption. Make it an inclusive approach rather than an exclusive one!

Enforce Deployment Policies from the Start
Deployment Policies are crucial for an organization to ensure that users are kept in check, enforce the security of the Cloud & applications on the cloud as well as bring in the high level of automation that Cloud services can provide.Policies instruct automated systems on how, where and if a technical service can be deployed in your Cloud Environment.

Also published on BMC Communities