Cloud computing has the promise of significant benefits that include reduced costs, improved service provisioning, and a move to a pay-per-use model. However, there also are many challenges to successfully delivering cloud-based services; including security, data ownership, interoperability, service maturity and return on investment. These challenges need to be understood and managed before attempting to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer. In this paper we introduce a nine-step cloud life cycle that can be used for both the migration and the ongoing management of public, cloud-based services. A consortium of organizations using an open-innovation approach developed the life cycle. This paper describes each step of the life cycle in terms of the key challenges faced, and the recommended activities, with resultant outputs, needed to overcome them. G. Conway and E. Curry, Managing Cloud Computing: A Life Cycle Approach, in 2nd International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2012), 2012. Available at: http://www.edwardcurry.org/publications/Conway_CloudLifeCycle_2012.pdf

1. Managing Cloud Computing: A Life Cycle
Approach
Gerry Conway Innovation Value Institute (IVI)
Edward Curry Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI)
2nd International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services
Science (CLOSER 2012), Porto, Portugal 2012.
1

2. Adoption challenges with Cloud
Context and Background
The Cloud Life Cycle
Conclusions and future research
2

3. The Innovation Value Institute (IVI) is a consortium of leading
players designing approaches to managing IT for business value
Steering patrons
www.ivi.ie
IVI membership includes 75+ organizations from leading
enterprises, consulting, not-for-profit, government and academic organizations
3

4. IVI Vision: transform the way public and private sector
organisations manage IT for business value and innovation i.e.
shift enterprise capability to the right
High Dated practices Standard Best practices Emerging next High
practices practices
Enterprise IT capability to
deliver business value
Low Low
Low Level of Firm / Industry Adoption High

5. IT Capability Maturity Framework™
High • Value-centric IT management
Optimizing • State-of-the-art practices and
outcomes
inspired by CMMI
• Benefits from IT investments
quantified and communicated
Advanced
• Practices and outcomes well
IT-CMF Macro Capabilitiey
above industry average
Maturity
• IT/business interaction forma-
Intermediate lized for all critical processes
• Transparent investment decisions
• Delivering basic IT services
Basic • Some IT/business interactions
formalized
• No formal processes
Initial
• Ad-hoc management of IT
Low
Defines maturity profiles across IT domains to transform organizations
from cost-centre to value-centres

6. The IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF)
6

7. Benefits of the IT-CMF
• Leverages the collective intelligence of the Consortium
Development plus industry & academic research
• IT-CMF integrates existing frameworks/ standards into a
Integrated meta-level architecture to provide an integrated & holistic
framework
• IT-CMF allows measurement of improvement against a
Assessment baseline using standard assessment tools
Benchmarking • IT-CMF provides benchmarking against peers
• IT-CMF provides prioritization & improvement
Recommend recommendations for 30+ critical process areas

8. Quotes from users of the IT-CMF
Pharmaceuticals company Merck has used the framework to save 8%
on its budget for technology innovation and 20% on its total budget for
experiments.
Intel has reported a 25% improvement in IT capability for 10% less
money.
Axa-Tech, the IT division of insurance company Axa, says it has
achieved a 96% reduction in set-up working time for new servers, an
81% drop in total cycle time to set-up virtual servers
Mike Bevil, manager of IT innovation at MRL, told Computer Weekly that
using the framework had enabled the company to improve the "hit rate"
of successful projects by 20%.
BP group enterprise architect Vincenzo Marchese says the IT-CMF has
helped BP reduce the number of suppliers it deals with and move
projects from pilot to production status more quickly.
8

9. Adoption Challenges for the Cloud
How does the IT-CMF
help me with Cloud?
9

10. Drivers for the adoption of Cloud
Reduce Cost
Scalability and flexibility
Agility and adaptability
Better use of resource
Increased collaboration
Remote access and increased mobility
IVI-CP Templates-v057-18Feb09-SB.pot 10

11. Adoption challenges with Cloud
Functionality & Performance
Compliance & Security
ROI
Connectivity & Availability
Architecture & Migration
SLA Monitoring
IVI-CP Templates-v057-18Feb09-SB.pot 11

12. IVI Approach
Work Group Research Solution
12

13. A Cloud Lifecycle
Adopted from: Cullen, S., Seddon, P., and Wilcox, L.
Managing Outsourcing, The Life Cycle Imperative.
MIS Quarterly Executive, Mach 2005, pp.229-256
13

14. Cloud and the IT-CMF
The IT-CMF Cloud Life Cycle delivers
• Maturity Assessment
• An improvement roadmap
• Best practice
14

15. Contents
Context and Background
The Cloud Life Cycle
Conclusions and future research
15

16. The IT-CMF Cloud Life Cycle
16

17. The Cloud Life Cycle – Methodology
Each step has defined:
• Objectives: What has to be
achieved
• Activities: What needs to be done
to accomplish the objectives
• Outputs: List the key deliverables
17

18. The Cloud Life Cycle - Investigate
Objective
To provide an insight and understanding of what the organisation
wants to achieve by moving to the Cloud and what goals and
expectations are to be met. This will be based on an analysis of
the appropriate industrial segment, with insights from experts and
experiences from peer organisations, together with knowledge of
potential suppliers.
Activities
• Determine the organisations IT objectives and its alignment
with the business
• Determine what role Cloud computing will play within the IT
Strategy
• Gather intelligence on Cloud offerings
• Validate with subject matter experts
Outputs
• IT strategy for Cloud computing
• Strategic intent of moving to the Cloud and how it progresses
the business objectives.
• Intelligence document on offerings and service providers
• What will be achieved: compare strategic intent with the
intelligence gathered
18

19. The Cloud Life Cycle - Investigate
Challenges
IT to meet new requirements, with reduced budgets.
Financial
− Cost benefit analysis: difficult to do if not all cost are
known or understood.
− Capex to Opex: Although it saves money overall, Capex
may already be spent depending on where the service is
in its life cycle. Further resistance by the perceived lack of
financial control of the pay-as-you go model.
− The need for seed funding to investigate cloud options.
Example
One of the company interviewed had a strategy of providing
the same or better functionality at a reduced cost, to move IT
people up the value chain and to encourage the use of shared
IT services. Extensive investigation with suppliers and
adopters proved that all of these could be achieved. The main
draw backs were the financial constraints plus a certain
resistance from the user community who did not directly get
any financial benefits
19

20. The Cloud Life Cycle – Manage the Supply Chain
Objective
Manage the new environment as efficiently and effectively as
possible. The organisation will need to adapt to the new set-up
particularly at management level, as rather than directly managing
internal resources, the requirement will be to manage the supplier
and in particular the supplier relationship. This will require
effective monitoring and control so that issue, variations and
disputes can be resolved to both parties satisfaction.
Activities
• Manage and report at operational level.
• Capture and manage issues, variations and disputes.
• Manage the supplier relationship.
• Change management.
• Continuous improvement.
• Assess and validate how the Cloud system is performing.
Outputs
• Day to day performance metrics.
• Status on issues, problems, variations and disputes.
• Supplier meeting minutes.
• Change management report.
• Audit reports.
20

21. The Cloud Life Cycle – Manage the Supply Chain
Challenges
• Integration of the Cloud service with existing reporting and
support structures.
• That management make a smooth transition from
managing their own internal staff to managing the supplier
and the interfaces.
• The control, communication and co-ordination of internal
and external changes.
Example:
• It is working very well as they have a very successful
relationship with the supplier. They now have a much
better service which allows for better user management
which they now describe as being at an enterprise level.
• The supplier provides notification within agreed time lines
for all changes, including outages and critical patches.
• The service is at such a level that a supplier review is
done on an as-required basis. There are regular
scheduled reviews with user groups.
• They have retained the flexibility to move back in-house or
to an alternative supplier - 3 months’ notice period agreed
up-front.
21

22. Contents
Context and Background
The Cloud Life Cycle
Conclusions and future research
22

23. Conclusion
The research has demonstrated the value of the approach
Case Study
IT-CMF provides a holistic framework that organizations can use to
assess their readiness to move to a cloud computing environment,
while minimizing risk. Furthermore, IT-CMF specifies a systematic
approach to Cloud implementation through an assessment and the
creation of definitive and practical improvement roadmaps
23

24. Future Research
IVI Strategy - Layered Approach
Is cloud computing appropriate for my business
• Is public, private, community or hybrid the most appropriate to use
• Should I be using NaaS, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, BPaaS or XaaS
How is my business positioned to use cloud
• Cloud Assessment
– Assess your readiness to move to cloud
– Assess how well you are managing the cloud environment if already migrated
– The assessment can be tailored, based on what stage you are in your migration
How do I objectively rate the Cloud Service Providers (CSP)
• CSP Assessment
• Ability to quickly rate how vendors compare
• Can be easily customised to suit different business requirements and
sectors
24

25. Further information
Gerry Conway - gerard.conway@nuim.ie
www.ivi.ie +353 1 708 6931
More Information
G. Conway and E. Curry, Managing Cloud Computing: A
Life Cycle Approach, in 2nd International Conference on
Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER
2012), 2012.
M. A. Lindner, F. McDonald, G. Conway, and E.
Curry, Understanding Cloud Requirements - A Supply
Chain Life Cycle Approach, in Second International
Conference on Cloud Computing, GRIDs, and Virtualization
(Cloud Computing 2011), 2011, pp. 20-25.
Funded by:
Science Foundation Ireland (Grant SFI/08/CE11380)
Enterprise Ireland (Grant CC/2009/0801)
25