Introducing Private Cloud – The Pitfalls to Avoid!

The business world is abuzz with discussion on the best practices of adopting private cloud. The preference for private over public is mainly because of service-level, data security and portability issues that surround a third-party cloud computing system. Companies that want to retain complete control over their data on a cloud environment are mostly inclined to adopt private cloud set-up. Unfortunately we have experienced that private cloud computing projects have a higher rate of failure. It can be attributed to the following conditions:

Insufficient Planning:

Most companies don’t bother to go into the length of planning before implementing private cloud in their organizations. But introducing cloud to your business would demand changes in your technological as well as working environment. Most CEOs and CIOs fail to visualize the necessary changes the cloud will bring to their organization. It may require you to augment and upgrade your technological infrastructure as per a careful analysis of your virtualization requirements. At the same time you’d also need your workforce to acclimate to the changed environment.

Vision:

Often enterprises haste into introducing cloud without properly analyzing the outputs they want from it. An unclear vision is a great deterrent towards successful transition to cloud platform. If you lack in vision and goal you’ll find that instead of bringing the cost down a cloud interface will prove costlier for you.

Collaboration:

Private cloud is not an adhoc or stand alone implementation. But to reap the most benefit from cloud based technology one needs to ensure a successful collaboration of it with the existing interfaces as well. You’d need to evaluate if cloud is an option for your existing environment and if not, what needs to be done for a successful strategic consolidation.

Skewed Expectations:

The much surrounding hypes about cloud to reduce workload and cost are the main reasons for companies to get a false idea about it. You need to understand that cloud isn’t a magic solution to fix the dismal condition of your business. You can’t have it up and running within a short time.  It would need to you to plan and consider the scopes of having a private cloud environment. At the same time, you’d also need to deal with changing the mindset of your employees to make it more acceptable to them.

Cloud computing can be successfully brought in if we are careful to avoid the above mentioned pitfalls. Here we have enumerated the best practices to make the private cloud computing project viable.

Preparing the Ground:

The question you need to the find answer for is whether or not your organization is ready to take the plunge to the virtualized environment. You’d need to evaluate the scopes minutely and prepare the ground for strategic shift.

The Testing:

This stage can also be termed as acclimation phase where you’d need to test the ground, read the mindset of your employees and run a pilot project to estimate its success. You need to train your workforce to work in a virtualized environment and test your applications in a cloud platform.

Strategic consolidation:

Once you accustom yourself with virtualization the stage comes when you need to consider the cost saving advantages of cloud computing. You need to understand the cloud would bring a prodigious shift to your existing set-up. It would require you to install new server, hardware and virtualization OS before successful implementation of cloud. Next you need to evaluate how you can transfer your existing software packages to cloud without upsetting much of your regular business activities.

At the final phase when the stage for private cloud implementation is ready you need to devise appropriate cloud based policies to ensure that the ROI on the private cloud is greater than your initial investment. This can be achieved through optimizing its utility.