Internal Cloud Management: Bringing Order from Chaos

If you are taking the plunge and building an internal cloud for your organization you are in good company. Internal clouds should enable you to empower internal consumers while at the same time maintain a certain level of safety and control. But if you're worried about the ROI from a cost or performance standpoint, and you realize that operationally this new infrastructure will actually add complexity before things get easier, you wouldn't be wrong. Self-service models and ad-hoc provisioning processes can actually create operational chaos, and there are important considerations to be mindful of to remain in compliance with your corporate policies as you move workloads to this new cloud infrastructure.

There are strategies and tools available for ensuring your VMs are running on the optimal hosting environment to meet SLA requirements, performance, security, resiliency and geographical constraints. There are also different ways to approach self-service. Instant provisioning of capacity may not be as important as provisioning capacity intelligently, particularly when enterprise workloads are involved.