Common Challenges Of Private Cloud Implementations

According to IDC, the global market for private cloud computing is expected to increase by 60% and reach 12 billion dollars by 2014, and approximately 44% of companies consider implementing a private cloud solution.

Even though private clouds are on the rise, there are still some challenges companies have to realize when implementing these models. In previous articles I’ve discussed about the benefits of private and public clouds and about whether the private cloud is the right decision or not. Today we’ll go even further in this topic and see which are the most common challenges of private cloud implementations and how to overcome them.

Huge investments

The cloud helps saving big amounts of money – this is one of the biggest benefits of cloud computing. However, you first need to get to this place.  Shared cloud solutions do not require additional hardware and software, this is not true for private clouds, there will be investment into  IT infrastructure, into space to setup the infrastructure and large amounts of bandwidth to access that infrastructure from remote locations. At the same time, the business and the IT users have to be trained for this initiative, which adds additional costs.

This is why, it’s recommended, if not necessary, that companies analyze the long term savings and infrastructure requirements before implementing a private cloud.

IT Reluctance

The IT department usually handles the IT operations in a company. Once the private cloud has been implemented, less involvement of IT resources are needed.  During the migration, IT will also be responsible for working with finance, administrative departments, security, backup and disaster recovery departments when migrating over to a private cloud.

So many changes and the unknowns of their role going forward usually make people from IT departments reluctant and it’s easy to see why. To facilitate this process, the management team should be  involved with IT early, to explain the benefits of the migration and work on cross training the IT team to help with core competency initiatives that benefit the companies bottom line.

Defining the IT cost model

This is a very important issue. Once the cloud services have been implemented, how will the company allocate costs back to departments?  Will it be time based or resource usage based. IT will be part of defining a clear cost model.

It’s your turn now! Have you implemented private clouds? What were the biggest challenges for you or your company, and how did you overcome them?

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