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Four Practical Steps to Private Cloud Computing

If it is your job to translate overhyped demands to take your business ‘To The Cloud!’ you know there is not enough reality in cloud computing. You cannot start from scratch, nor can you simply deploy dynamic virtualization and call it done. You must accommodate legacy investments, architectural spaghetti, ‘technical debt’, manual processes and more. So where do you start?

In our recent book, Visible Ops - Private Cloud: From Virtualization to Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps, my co-authors (Kurt Milne, Jeanne Morain) and I spoke with dozens of IT leaders about their experiences building their own ‘private clouds’. By documenting the successes and failures common to the best performers, we came up with a realistic stepwise process that builds on legacy investments, capitalizes on existing skills, and incorporates necessary processes, to deliver the benefits of cloud computing.

Phase 1: Cut through the cloud clutter

The first step entails planning and communicating objectives, managing initial proof of concept efforts, and developing competency roadmaps.

Successful cloud implementations result from executing a business strategy, not rolling out new IT projects. You need to cut through the hype by establishing a service portfolio view of infrastructure and applications, measuring current service performance and cost, setting goals for service improvement, and establishing some initial success, before you start transforming virtual infrastructure into private cloud.

Understanding application performance and response times, service fulfillment cycles, service level metrics, key competencies, operating and capital costs, etc. allows you to plan achievable improvements. This in turn helps to cut through the hype in order to show your business what they should realistically expect from your private cloud strategy.

Phase 2: Design services, not systems

With a plan in place, start to design business optimized cloud services, enable one-touch service ordering, and implement a repeatable approach for build and deploy.
Business services must be standardized, cataloged, and automated to establish repeatable user-driven onramps to deploying resources. This requires a new approach to Business Service Management to avoid an ever-expanding complex catalog of bespoke ‘services’ that are never deployed the same way twice.

This is a critical difference between building virtualized applications and delivering cloud services. IT-centric approaches that elevate administrative complexity and control will not work in dynamic cloud environments. Some essential aspects of legacy BSM frameworks remain important, but cloud computing will kill complex controls in favor of simplified enablement that puts business users in charge.

Phase 3: Orchestrate and optimize resources

With service design complete, you should update monitoring and alerting, codify policy-based event responses, and automate resource changes and workload moves.
Technologies like application performance management, resource optimization, and process automation are immensely important in a private cloud environment. An effective private cloud relies on technologies that monitor real-time performance of end-to-end business services, detect variations from defined performance models, diagnose the true root cause of problems, match performance requirements to available resource pool capacity, and automatically adjust and optimize resource allocation to match.

This is much more than just response time measurement and live migration. Effective private clouds optimize complete business services, not just virtual machines. Live migration is important, but not sufficient, to deliver a successful private cloud.

Phase 4: Align and accelerate business results

With the heavy technology lifting done, complete the transition to a resource rental model by reshaping consumption behavior and streamlining response to business needs.

This entails moving targeted workloads to your private cloud to leverage its benefits, understanding and communicating the service cost, quality, and agility measures of each cloud environment, and actively reshaping demand for IT resources using a rental model.

This change in business behavior enables private cloud to be successful in ways automated virtualization cannot. Virtualization is an IT-centric technology that does not require business users to change their behaviors, as IT is still in charge. With cloud computing, business users are in charge, so they must ‘learn’ some of the discipline needed to maintain acceptable cost, security, risk, performance, etc.

Summary

This is of course a simplified version of the practical four-step process from virtualization to cloud. Clearly developing and delivering your own private cloud is not even this simple. However, with a concise, practical, and realistic approach born of the real-world successes and failures of those who have already done it, as documented in Visible Ops - Private Cloud: From Virtualization to Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps, you can achieve phenomenal results, drive IT efficiency, and deliver significant business benefits with your own private cloud.

About Andi Mann

Andi Mann is Vice President of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies. With over 20 years’ experience across four continents, Andi has deep expertise of enterprise software on cloud, mainframe, midrange, server and desktop systems. Andi has worked within IT departments for governments and corporations, from small businesses to global multi-nationals; with several large enterprise software vendors; and as a leading industry analyst advising enterprises, governments, and IT vendors – from startups to the worlds’ largest companies. He has been widely published including in the New York Times, USA Today, CIO, ComputerWorld, InformationWeek, TechTarget, and more. He has presented around the world on virtualization, cloud, automation, and IT management, at events such as Gartner ITxpo, VMworld, CA World, Interop, Cloud Computing Expo, SAPPHIRE, Citrix Synergy, Cloud Slam, and others. Andi is a co-author of the popular handbook, Visible Ops – Private Cloud; he blogs at Andi Mann – Übergeek, and tweets as @AndiMann.

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Four Practical Steps to Private Cloud Computing

If it is your job to translate overhyped demands to take your business ‘To The Cloud!’ you know there is not enough reality in cloud computing. You cannot start from scratch, nor can you simply deploy dynamic virtualization and call it done. You must accommodate legacy investments, architectural spaghetti, ‘technical debt’, manual processes and more. So where do you start?

In our recent book, Visible Ops - Private Cloud: From Virtualization to Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps, my co-authors (Kurt Milne, Jeanne Morain) and I spoke with dozens of IT leaders about their experiences building their own ‘private clouds’. By documenting the successes and failures common to the best performers, we came up with a realistic stepwise process that builds on legacy investments, capitalizes on existing skills, and incorporates necessary processes, to deliver the benefits of cloud computing.

Phase 1: Cut through the cloud clutter

The first step entails planning and communicating objectives, managing initial proof of concept efforts, and developing competency roadmaps.

Successful cloud implementations result from executing a business strategy, not rolling out new IT projects. You need to cut through the hype by establishing a service portfolio view of infrastructure and applications, measuring current service performance and cost, setting goals for service improvement, and establishing some initial success, before you start transforming virtual infrastructure into private cloud.

Understanding application performance and response times, service fulfillment cycles, service level metrics, key competencies, operating and capital costs, etc. allows you to plan achievable improvements. This in turn helps to cut through the hype in order to show your business what they should realistically expect from your private cloud strategy.

Phase 2: Design services, not systems

With a plan in place, start to design business optimized cloud services, enable one-touch service ordering, and implement a repeatable approach for build and deploy.
Business services must be standardized, cataloged, and automated to establish repeatable user-driven onramps to deploying resources. This requires a new approach to Business Service Management to avoid an ever-expanding complex catalog of bespoke ‘services’ that are never deployed the same way twice.

This is a critical difference between building virtualized applications and delivering cloud services. IT-centric approaches that elevate administrative complexity and control will not work in dynamic cloud environments. Some essential aspects of legacy BSM frameworks remain important, but cloud computing will kill complex controls in favor of simplified enablement that puts business users in charge.

Phase 3: Orchestrate and optimize resources

With service design complete, you should update monitoring and alerting, codify policy-based event responses, and automate resource changes and workload moves.
Technologies like application performance management, resource optimization, and process automation are immensely important in a private cloud environment. An effective private cloud relies on technologies that monitor real-time performance of end-to-end business services, detect variations from defined performance models, diagnose the true root cause of problems, match performance requirements to available resource pool capacity, and automatically adjust and optimize resource allocation to match.

This is much more than just response time measurement and live migration. Effective private clouds optimize complete business services, not just virtual machines. Live migration is important, but not sufficient, to deliver a successful private cloud.

Phase 4: Align and accelerate business results

With the heavy technology lifting done, complete the transition to a resource rental model by reshaping consumption behavior and streamlining response to business needs.

This entails moving targeted workloads to your private cloud to leverage its benefits, understanding and communicating the service cost, quality, and agility measures of each cloud environment, and actively reshaping demand for IT resources using a rental model.

This change in business behavior enables private cloud to be successful in ways automated virtualization cannot. Virtualization is an IT-centric technology that does not require business users to change their behaviors, as IT is still in charge. With cloud computing, business users are in charge, so they must ‘learn’ some of the discipline needed to maintain acceptable cost, security, risk, performance, etc.

Summary

This is of course a simplified version of the practical four-step process from virtualization to cloud. Clearly developing and delivering your own private cloud is not even this simple. However, with a concise, practical, and realistic approach born of the real-world successes and failures of those who have already done it, as documented in Visible Ops - Private Cloud: From Virtualization to Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps, you can achieve phenomenal results, drive IT efficiency, and deliver significant business benefits with your own private cloud.

About Andi Mann

Andi Mann is Vice President of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies. With over 20 years’ experience across four continents, Andi has deep expertise of enterprise software on cloud, mainframe, midrange, server and desktop systems. Andi has worked within IT departments for governments and corporations, from small businesses to global multi-nationals; with several large enterprise software vendors; and as a leading industry analyst advising enterprises, governments, and IT vendors – from startups to the worlds’ largest companies. He has been widely published including in the New York Times, USA Today, CIO, ComputerWorld, InformationWeek, TechTarget, and more. He has presented around the world on virtualization, cloud, automation, and IT management, at events such as Gartner ITxpo, VMworld, CA World, Interop, Cloud Computing Expo, SAPPHIRE, Citrix Synergy, Cloud Slam, and others. Andi is a co-author of the popular handbook, Visible Ops – Private Cloud; he blogs at Andi Mann – Übergeek, and tweets as @AndiMann.

Related Links:

12 Things You Need to Know About Application Performance Management in the Cloud

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...