I have written much over the last 24 months about the value of cloud computing and the inevitability that this will be fundamental to the delivery of technology enabled business services. Following the recent, well-documented cloud outages including Amazon Web Services and the Sony Playstation Network, I was asked this week if my opinions on cloud have changed. In fact, one organization I visited told me that these outages had led to a reinforcement of their no cloud policy. For me, however, my opinion remains unchanged.  Cloud computing is and will continue to be a game changer and is the next stage of the evolution of computing. What these incidents (or are they problems?) highlighted for me is the requirement for effective governance and service management are fundamental prerequisites.

As we move to the public cloud the existing focus on internal needs to move to external and we need to change our definitions including;

• Internal Service Level Agreements are replaced by contract terms and conditions
• Incidents will be replaced with defects
• Errors could be expensive especially where rework is required
• Customizations are often expensive
• Financial penalties will be commonplace but will need to monitored for credits
• Vendors will become partners

To leverage cloud computing successfully the traditional approach to Service Management will not work. The primary difference is that you are moving from owning the assets which you can control as opposed to cloud computing where you pay for what you consume, subsequently your span of control changes. In this scenario you will be paying for all you consume, all the changes you request and if you are not getting value, typically you will have the trouble and costs of changing suppliers.

Failure to change traditional principles and approaches when adopting cloud computing dramatically increases chances of failure.To effectively leverage cloud computing the adoption of established best practices rather organic home grown practices is recommended. ITIL should be adopted for service management and COBIT governance ensuring quality control and assurance.

The next few blogs from me will discuss the relevance and value of ITIL and COBIT and how to leverage them in the cloud.