With the onslaught of migrating into the “Cloud” in today’s ever changing Information Technology arena and the buzz of Agile projects running activities in this space, have we forgotten some of the basic items which would make both processes much easier to manage and ultimately succeed ?
A recent engagement has highlighted the facts of existing infrastructures not being fully understood before projects and programmes of work being managed in the agile methodology come along and try to carry out some form of change, migration or upgrade. This coupled to the new world cloud infrastructure not being ready to accept the wave of these changes being presented to it means a large proportion of these projects fail, but not until a considerable volume of work has been carried out, at it must be said a significant cost.
The public cloud providers want your business, and are more than happy to accept as many instances as can be placed onto them. However the teams that support these new infrastructures need to understand that the way of working will change, security elements will become more scrutinised, and decisions regarding what should be allowed into these public clouds has to be clear from the very beginning of a service definition.
Having your house in order prior to any activities taking place will greatly increase the success of clean and accurate migrations of existing services to the public cloud. In an attempt to provide insight into these activities we look back to the framework of ITIL. Yes it’s now many years old but the simple construct of its terms and definitions are being neglected somewhat by the agile project management framework.
Configuration Management is at the core of any good IT service being operated in the organisation, it provides the process for maintaining information about the Configuration Items required to provide an IT Service, this will also include it’s Relationships to other Configuration Items and Service Asset definitions.
Configuration Items are defined as any component that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT Service, these will include other IT Services, hardware and software. Commonly the Configuration Items are recorded in a Configuration Record within a Configuration Management System, and is maintained during its lifecycle by Configuration Management.
With just these basic processes in place it starts to eliminate the additional work needed for the agile project to migrate or transform services into the public cloud.
And as a final word, a number of regulatory bodies have a higher focus on the use of public cloud services. Ensure your compliance is met, this can include the smallest of items like the data structures and types in use.
