Agile organizations and cloud computing

21th century will mainly be about embracing change. Organizations will need to adapt to change in market conditions. The faster an organization can change its products or services and generate income based on those services; more it will be likely to survive. As a part of this requirement, companies will more and more depend on IT to provide agility to fuel business value. IT departments will need to restructure themselves to increase their capabilities to provide more value from their assets.

In order for IT to prove itself as a strategic asset, it would need to mature in operations. Microsoft is using Infrastructure optimization model to measure how mature an IT organization is in different areas according to different set of criteria. This model has 4 stages for different areas of operation:

· Basic: This is stage one where there is no standardization, no automation and no integration among different systems. It organization is generally in reactive mode trying to put out fires, and there is no standard procedure or best practices available to solve common day to day problems. For example there is no centralized Identity store such as Active Directory and users are using local users to logon to their laptops.

· Standard: This is stage two where there is standardization on different processes. IT is still in reactive mode but problems are categorized and best practices available for common problems. However, measuring quality of IT services is still nonexistent or depends on manual data collection methods. For example all users are defined in Active Directory but there is no integration with an HR system.

· Rationalized: This is stage 3 where processes are highly automated and there is integration with different systems. For example there is automation between the HR system and AD. When new employees are provisioned in HR system a user is created in AD. Note that in order for this to work, there needs to be consensus about what needs to be done when a new employee is hired for the company.

· Dynamic: This is stage 4 where change in processes are also under control. This is the stage where IT is providing insight for the business and acts as a strategic asset for the organization.

Most of the organizations do not realize how hard it is to change until the need arises. As you would guess it would need quite a lot of effort to move along from one stage to the next and the hardest part is not implementing the technology but it is to change perception in the organization on how things get done. Any person talking to HR on why they need define identity lifecycle will quickly understand that installing and configuring Forefront Identity Manager alone will not solve the issue.

When organizations start seeing the benefits of moving from one stage to another, it will be easier to embrace the change. However this does not mean that change will be easy. It will take time to plan, test and implement the required processes using suitable Technologies. The good news is, using cloud technologies can ease the burden. Unfortunately cloud can mean different things to different people. From operational perspective there are 2 types of clouds:

· Public Cloud: These are companies providing cloud services. Generally you pay for their services as you use them. You would be alleviated from the necessity to acquire, provision and maintain assets for the service in question. Depending on the service, you would have means to control the availability and performance and change them when necessary. Most of the time organizations would be sharing resources with other organizations of the cloud fabric. You can also choose to have your resources dedicated for your own use.

· Private Cloud: This is the cloud where you build your own cloud services to provide to your own organization. This is more suitable for organizations with large number of IT assets and IT is mature to manage these efficiently.

Small companies will not have the necessary IT to build private clouds and will partly move to public cloud infrastructure. There will be concerns around technical and non-technical issues, most being solved in the near future. We will see companies using mixed infrastructures and balance will gravitate toward public cloud where possible. 

Larger organizations will have more complex requirements and may choose to host some of their services in the public cloud. However private cloud will also be a viable option that we will see materializing for these organizations.  When talking to the customers about the cloud, building a private cloud seems as a natural evolution of IT. However this is a delicate situation if IT is not mature according to Infrastructure optimization model. Implementing the technology even in massive scale will not help the organization build a successful private cloud. You need the right skills with enough people to operate the cloud. You need an accepted business model inside the company to sustain the service levels. You need a management willing to continuously improve efficiency, provide new services and retire old ones when necessary.

Clearly organizations will need to evolve in the 21th century. They will need to change the way they do business. Cloud can help you change your business by providing services that can adapt to your business needs. However it will not help you create better value out of your business. Organization will need to transform itself to provide more value leveraging cloud as necessary.