Learning from early cloud adopters

These reports often highlight the many important benefits of cloud computing, including improved efficiency and reduced costs.  But for the organisations involved, the journey to the cloud can be challenging, if they have to find their way without a map. 
In most journeys it is valuable to try to learn from those who have gone before, in order to find the fastest route and avoid the pitfalls.  For this reason HP worked with the research firm IDC to organise a global survey of 500 early cloud adopters to learn about their journey and identify best practices for success.
We found five vital best practices that Thai organisations should keep in mind if they’re contemplating moving to the cloud. 
For the survey respondents, introducing cloud technology into their organisations represented a major transformation, and this in turn led to many related changes. But despite the challenges, cloud innovators are seeing definite benefits, including reduced costs and improved application provisioning, resulting in a better relationship between the IT function and the business as a whole.
Compared to life pre-cloud, about 65 per cent of organisations saw improvement in terms of application provisioning, time and cost. On business agility, organisations saw a 62-per-cent improvement. Sixty-one per cent said that the relationship between their line of business and IT was improved. Fifty-seven per cent said that their runtime performance was better, and 55 per cent said that financial management of the application portfolio had improved.
For Thai organisations that want to achieve these benefits, the cloud early adopters recommended that the overall transformation be broken down into bite-sized projects that make it possible to define an outcome and show results.
Two key priority areas that many early adopters identified were security and automated application provisioning. For security, the survey indicated that it was important to fix security vulnerabilities at every step of the journey. And as cloud environments become more complex, it will be hard to keep environments agile without automation being part of the solution, and this is particularly important for application provisioning to end users.
Five steps to success
Based on the experiences of early cloud adopters, there are five critical steps for successful integrated cloud management. And because the move to cloud technology is an ongoing evolution, these five steps should be followed for every project.
1. Define a plan
Cloud projects bring together infrastructure operations, application developers, release teams and line-of-business users. There needs to be an organised plan that links to very specific benchmarks, costs and goals.
2. Assess costs and benchmarks
Look at the current costs of infrastructure and operations and then define benchmarks for application support, provisioning and resource consumption.
3. Opt for automation
Identify opportunities to reduce costs and speed up service delivery by using automation for integrated application and infrastructure provisioning.
4. Monitor and integrate
Look to create a more integrated application-infrastructure provisioning and operations environment. Monitor those systems, tying real-time capacity planning analytics with automated provisioning systems.
5. Include security from the start
Integrate security strategies and priorities across the lifecycle, from application development and release to operations.
The goal of our project was not to provide a highly detailed blueprint for a cloud transformation, but rather a high level overview of the key areas that IT managers and business leaders should consider when starting their cloud transformation process. 
We believed that the best way to do this was to ask those who had already been through the process and achieved success.  Thus, while following the five steps is not a guarantee of a smooth and trouble-free move to the cloud, it will improve the odds that basic mistakes will be avoided and the learning curve shortened. 

Varaporn Pintola is general manager of technology services at Hewlett-Packard (Thailand).