Cloud initiatives can be complex for almost any organi-zation, whether the initiative is to build a private, public, or hybrid cloud. While your initial goal may be to create a cloud architecture that meets immediate needs, the cloud you build today must also meet the business requirements of tomorrow. Careful planning is an absolute prerequisite for successful cloud operations.

So, where do you begin? It’s important to take a straight-forward and prescriptive approach to cloud planning and design. Requirements must be mapped to busi-ness priorities to ensure that your cloud services meet business objectives and drive profit. The three steps outlined in this article provide a road map for your journey to the cloud. You don’t need to go through this alone, either. BMC Consulting Services can help you through the process.

Three Steps to Cloud Planning and DesignThe place to begin is with planning and design, which should focus on creating a cloud that meets the needs of your business. Cloud planning can be divided into three steps:

» Cloud Services Design — Designing internal and/or external cloud services, defining the ser-vice tiers and service levels, and creating a ser-vice “bill of materials”

» Cloud Operations Definition — Defining the cloud reference architecture, designing performance and capacity planning, and defining operational compliance and security

» Cloud Process Business Planning — Planning for demand and how you will manage cloud ser-vice providers, defining service costing and pric-ing, and ensuring regulatory compliance

Meeting the Challenge: Strategies for SuccessLike any IT initiative, a cloud project is not without its challenges. The following tips will help you to avoid some of the potential pitfalls along the way.

KNOW WHY YOU ARE ENTERING THE CLOUD IN THE FIRST PLACE. WHAT BUSINESS OBJECTIVE(S) ARE YOU TRYING TO MEET?

For a cloud initiative to be successful, it needs direc-tion and purpose, or the scope of the project is likely to expand exponentially. Let your business objec-tives provide that focus. Along the way, don’t forget to interact with your line-of-business customers, as they may have some specific requirements for a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) focus to support their business that will drive part of your strategy.

Organizations begin cloud initiatives for many rea-sons. Perhaps you want to gain flexibility in the way

CLOUD PLANNING AND DESIGN: YOUR ROAD MAP TO SUCCESS By Eric Blum, Vice President, CTO Office, and Alan Chhabra, Director, Consulting Services, BMC Software

B M C I N D U S T R Y INSIGHTS

There’s no doubt about it: If you haven’t already moved to the cloud, it’s time to consider

doing so. The global cloud computing market is predicted to grow to $121 billion by 2015,

up from $37.8 billion in 2010.1 Yet while the pressure is on to join the massive rush to the

cloud, doing so without thoughtful planning can create problems down the road.

you service your virtualized infrastructure for quality and time-to-market. Perhaps you think that a cloud initiative can save your organization money by reducing the number of people in the data center, automating more functions, or reducing time to deployment. Or perhaps your CEO has simply mandated that the CTO showcase a variety of initiatives that leverage the cloud.

SET PRIORITIES

If you try to do everything at once, you could find yourself “boiling the ocean” — taking on an initiative that is so broad in scope that it is impossible to com-plete. The result can be a project that will be massively expensive, take many years to deliver, and be almost impossible to support.

Instead, prioritize what you need in terms of an iterative approach, and allocate adequate time for each stage of the project. We strongly recommend having a three-phase approach to cloud planning and design.

» Phase 1: Focus on time to market and size to estab-lish a cloud foundation for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) on a restricted technology set, with the key use cases for IT management in the cloud. Validate your underlying infrastructure reliability. Don’t look for end-to-end integration as a start, as the volume will be limited at this stage.

» Phase 2: Grow the service portfolio to include the applications (such as collaboration services), and augment the number of supported technologies in your heterogeneous environment. Ensure integra-tion of the cloud system with the standard operating procedures as the volume surges.

» Phase 3: Implement service cost control and man-agement, and optimize hardware and software infra-structure to service benefits (such as picking the right hypervisor for the right service). Validate that security and compliancy can be tightly monitored at low cost and high responsiveness.

DON’T EXPECT THE CLOUD TO SOLVE ALL YOUR PROBLEMS

Just because you can technically build a cloud doesn’t mean that you are on your way to cloud nirvana. If orga-nizational, political, or cultural barriers prevent your organization from operating effectively, a cloud initia-tive won’t necessarily solve those problems. For ex-ample, you may have one team that runs the network, one that runs storage, one that runs servers, and yet another that runs operations. If those teams don’t work well together or aren’t willing to give up some control, it will become difficult to automate the interactions among their functions. If you can’t break down such organizational barriers, you can’t solve the technical problems. You will need to solve those problems before your cloud initiative will be successful.

PLAN FOR HETEROGENEITY

You might think that the end structure of your first cloud should be homogenous and simple. Yet, if you follow this approach, when you move to expand the initiative in phases two and three, you will need a manageable plat-form for the larger implementations.

PLAN FOR INTEGRATION WITH THE VARIOUS SERVICE MANAGEMENT LAYERS

Cloud doesn’t mean the end of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) framework. Actually, cloud management makes ITIL-based processes more vital than ever, as the number of requests and changes will increase ten-fold. So, it is key that all cloud management activities and the status of the component items are properly reported in the configuration management database (CMDB). Without a properly built CMDB, you cannot meet objectives for service management and service level agreements (SLAs). You also cannot properly man-age priorities for the service desk or have opportunities to get better control over service cost management.

BUILD IN THE ABILITY TO METER SERVICE CONSUMPTION

It’s important to measure consumption so that you can provide information on the cost of services. With access to a listing of cloud services available on the portal, your customers now assume you have endless capa-bility to deliver whatever they want with the highest level of service available. Service unit price and actual service costs posted against their budget are then key elements to drive decisions and behaviors.

DON’T UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF THE SERVICE CATALOG

Defining your services is a key component of cloud planning and design. The service catalog is made of both business and technical items. It requires a road map, as the services will be released progressively.

The place to begin is with planning and design, which should focus on creating a cloud that meets the needs of your business.

The following BMC offerings can help you in the planning and design process:

» Baseline Discovery Audit Leverage our expertise to facilitate discovery of environment to identify infrastructure and application dependencies.

» Rapid Cloud Deployment Establish a cloud-based development environment in as little as 30 days.

» Cloud Solution Planning Workshop Work with experts to plan your cloud road map, leveraging BMC best practices and global engagement experience.

» Rapid Results for BMC Capacity Optimization A prescriptive approach to managing current and cloud-enabled capacity requirements.

» BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping Activation Identify existing workloads and dependencies.

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Each item has a lifecycle, and as such, catalog manage-ment deserves its own process owner and its own Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RACI). The catalog forces you to clarify the service delivery mechanism and to finalize the responsibilities within the provi-sioning automation — both throughout the IT depart-ment and with your IT suppliers.

Your Cloud Planning ChecklistAs you plan your cloud initiative, keep the following considerations in mind:

WHY DO YOU WANT TO BUILD A CLOUD?

Business objectives should drive the cloud planning and design process and give it focus. Always stay focused on why you are building the cloud in the first place.

WHAT IS YOUR LONG-TERM OPERATING STRATEGY?

Think about your strategy for when the cloud moves from planning to operation. Do you want your team to take full ownership of this cloud, or do you see a third-party consulting organization running the cloud for you?

WHAT IS YOUR SERVICE TRANSITION MODEL?

How do you move to a solid way of delivering services to the new budget proposal? How will you transition to the new service?

WHAT DOES SUCCESS LOOK LIKE FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION?

What data points will you collect to measure success, and how will you collect them? What is your strategy for gaining a return on your investment?

HOW WILL YOU WORK TOWARD CONTINUOUS SERVICE IMPROVE MENT (CSI) WHEN YOU MOVE INTO THE CLOUD OPERATIONS PHASE?

In the planning stage, you should already be thinking about how you will transition your business to the cloud and ensure a mature cloud adoption, as well as what

you will put in place to improve the services. The ser-vices you provide must be aligned with business expec-tations. CSI is how you recognize those gaps between what the end-user expects and what you deliver and enables you to adjust to meet those requirements.

How will you implement a CSI plan to augment the quality of service and accelerate the service life cycle? This involves designing new services, implementing services, metering and monitoring them, maintaining and improving the quality of delivery, and gaining and maintaining buy-in from the organization. By planning how you will manage from Day Two, you are also plan-ning for the best possible launch on Day One.

WHAT ARE THE COMPLIANCE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE CLOUD SERVICES?

You will need to look at both security compliance and regulatory compliance. With security compliance, you protect the cloud from intrusion and determine who is able to access certain areas. Many companies are un-der stricter access regulations because of the country in which they are located or due to the nature of their business. For example, some data may only be stored in a cloud in a specific geographic region. Other data,

As for regulatory compliance, it is tempting to expect that the cloud will automate and regulate itself, as if by magic.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORSEric Blum is BMC Software’s Chief Technology Officer for EMEA, with a particular emphasis on business value realization related to cloud implementations and large BSM deployments across international organizations. He conducted several program executive spon-sorships at the CXO level while in his previous role as vice president of EMEA Services at BMC. Prior to joining BMC, Blum was the director of the mySAP.com solution at SAP France. Before SAP, Blum held the position of e-commerce director at Informix, where he contributed to the Informix strategy for e-commerce and drove its deploy-ment across EMEA.

Alan Chhabra runs the cloud consulting practice for BMC Software and has more than 14 years of experience assist-ing enterprises in solving complex IT problems. Prior to BMC, he was at Egenera, where he led various strategic customer initiatives in cloud, utility computing, infrastructure virtualization, and establishing dynamic data centers, as well as managed Egenera’s Professional Services team. Chhabra was a consultant with Ernst and Young and a Charles Stark Draper Labs Master of Engineering Fellow. He is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering and his Master of Science degree in aerospace engineering.

BUSINESS RUNS ON I.T. I.T. RUNS ON BMC SOFTWAREBusiness thrives when IT runs smarter, faster and stronger. That’s why the most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC Software across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC offers a comprehensive approach and unified platform that helps IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk and drive business profit. For the four fiscal quarters ended June 30, 2011, BMC revenue was approximately $2.1 billion. For more information, visit www.bmc.com.

B M C I N D U S T R Y INSIGHTS

such as health care or financial information, may have very specific access requirements. These factors have a major impact on how you plan and operate your cloud.

As for regulatory compliance, it is tempting to expect that the cloud will automate and regulate itself, as if by magic. However, the cloud could very well increase the number of changes in the data center by 10 to 100 fold. Due to compliance checks and regulations, you will need to log all those changes and report on them. So in the context of setting up a cloud service platform, you must be aware of the security and regu la tory constraints and take those into account as you plan, design, build, and monitor your cloud.

How Services Can HelpBMC’s cloud planning initiatives are structured around a two- to four-week service offering called the Cloud Solution Planning Workshop. This workshop brings together BMC’s architects and subject matter experts from our business unit and CTO office with your organization’s key stake-holders. Together, we map all the requirements necessary to address business pain and/or gain, prioritize those requirements, and then put them into a prescriptive project plan — a road map to success. This process helps your business and IT departments to agree on a manageable scope, set the right expectations, and achieve milestones sooner rather than later.

The cloud planning workshop does more than simply help you to determine the fastest and most efficient way to provision a virtual machine. It can help you to look at your cloud initiative in full context, including storage, networking applications, databases, firewalls, and staffing. The workshop enables you to refine your objectives and review the best-in-class cloud environments, costing models, and required capabilities. It also helps you to refine a gap analysis and assess risk, change, and organizational readiness.

Real-World ExamplesThe following enterprises have realized significant benefits from this approach:

» A large, multinational information technology company has adopted a scalable solution for managing capacity and performance, enabling it to rapidly identify virtualization candidates and understand capacity requirements down the road. The company also has been able to continually and accurately plan and forecast future capacity requirements, save resources, and reduce its server footprint.

» A leading global software provider uses a cloud solution for its on-demand, supply-chain management software, allowing it to deliver cloud-based software in hours, rather than weeks or months, to its online customers. This has enabled rapid time to value for its business — and its customers — driving new revenue.

Closing ThoughtsBy leveraging the full breadth of BMC’s resources — from the unmatched capabilities of BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management to the proven expertise of BMC Consulting Services — you can develop your unique road map to successful operations in the cloud. You can ensure that each service meets business needs, increase administrative efficiency through well-designed policies, and integrate key IT processes to support the cloud environment.

For more information about cloud planning and design services from BMC, visit www.bmc.com/solutions/consulting-services/global-services-for-cloud-computing.html.

END NOTES

1. “Cloud Computing Market — Global Forecast (2010–2015),” MarketsandMarkets.com, October 2010, www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/cloud-computing-234.html.