Your datacenter - your business

This is just a blog post to remind you of something important.

Over the last year, I’ve been running around to organizations to teach them cloud computing, and to give them a view of what Microsoft’s cloud solutions can do to help them further in their transformation.

One of the questions I ask during my visit is if they know how many physical hosts they have running in their datacenter, as well as the amount of virtual machines.

Most of the time, they can’t provide the exact number. No big deal?

It depends.

If it’s a hoster or an ISV; they are probably deploying and decommissioning virtual machines on the fly, all day long. However, they should at least know how many hosts they are running to know if they have the required capacity to meet their internal requirements to do business.

This is a clear sign that the management tools they are using, doesn’t give them the big picture of how things are going.

When we dive deeper into their processes and architecture, it’s common to see that the communication between the different IT-departments isn’t the best of the best. It’s all a lack of solid management tools – and those different tools aren’t integrated at all.

I often have to ask them where they are today – and where they’re planning to go.

This will most often start the journey through System Center, including Windows Server 2012 (Hyper-V) and Windows Azure – for extension and rapid burst.

Based on experience and results of the work we have done, it’s easy to see how System Center – not only addressing the technical concerns and issues that the organizations may have at the time, but also brings better communications, workflows and better service delivery between the different departments. All from the Fabric and up to human resources, System Center deals with it.

And that brings us back to the topic.

To deal with cloud computing – no matter if it’s private, public or hybrid, you must understand your own organization. What you’re doing at the moment (health check of your environment etc) and where you’re going. Both short-term and long-term is important here.
Some will probably state that the cloud solutions from Microsoft is far too expensive, when just looking at the licenses. But that’s a sign that they haven’t been presented with the big picture of all the components. Remember, it will embrace every single thing in your organization.

I can guarantee that the ROI will put a smile on your face, and it will stay there.