You Just Failed Your Private Cloud Project… Why?

I have witnessed private cloud projects going belly up many times and by that I meant that these projects did not address the primary goals the sponsors set. Not that the goals were impossible or unachievable or maybe too exotic. Not at all! Actually the goals are the same for many organisations investing in private cloud projects. And by the way here are my top 3 goals organisations are looking at primarily when they decide to go private cloud:

1. Cut down cost
2. Better quality of service
3. Increase Business agility

So how comes organisations can’t address these simple goals? Where do they fail? Here are my 5 failure patterns:

1. Managing-by-magazine. No strategic plans.
2. Understanding your own requirements. No business case, migrate vs. innovate.
3. Lack of a holistic architectural discipline. Cloud will not save you from a good architecture design buddy.
4. IT organisation is not ready. Complexity to hide stupidity.
5. Insufficient Skill Set. Politics, technology groupies, design by best practice.

Now I tell you a secret. For a successful cloud project here is the recipe:

• Adapt your business processes.
• Simplify your IT processes.
• Buy-in of key stakeholders.
• Get the Experts in at the inception of the project.

And remember that Cloud Computing is much more than a technology from VMware, OpenStack or Microsoft. Cloud Computing is business opportunity to achieve cost reduction, better quality of service and increase Business agility.