This session covered the Issues that an Enterprise faces in creating a Private Cloud.

We had good representation (about 20 people) of Enterprise end users, software providers, cloud and industry consultants, and general interested parties.

The discussion centered around the creation of a Private cloud, which everyone seemed to agree is more than just a virtualized infrastructure.

Key Issues that an Organization faces that we identified during the discussion were:

1. Need to have a Virtualized infrastructure in place, where your resources (storage, compute) are in pool
2. Need to Virtualized the network - including elastic IP address capability so you have the flexibility at the applicaiton level
3. Need to understand the incremental costs of running on a cloud. This was from the planning perspective - how do I pay for growth and the demand side. This maps into the need for a good model for cost allocation and capacity planning.
4. Size of organization. It was generally agreed that taken on building a private cloud requires a larger sized organization with internal expertise. We did not come to conclusion on what that size level is.
5. Ownership Issues - there were both psychological issues around users owning resources and being willing to share and privacy/legislation issues on who could share resources even within an enterprise environment
6. License Management - one of the resources that needs to be tracked and managed for sharing in a private cloud
7. IT and Business Service Orientation. Need to move the IT and Business relationship to one of services vs, raw resource delivery, In a cloud the end users are abstracted from the physical location of their resources - everyone needs to be focused on the service and the service level
8. Application Type: What is suitable for cloud, how do you move complex multi-tier applications to the cloud.  This evolved into a discussion around Application monitoring and Profiling. To make sure you know your apps well before you migrate to cloud, and need to have a way to map application requirements to the policies that control the sharing of the infrastructure
9. Run Time SLA for Workload/Applicaiton - need to have a model of knowing when to adjust resources for the application, and the mechanicsms available to adjust resources.
10. Determine value of faster time to resources. A lot of discussion about public cloud is about immediate access to resources. Need to understand internally what applications/users really require this. How much is ad hoc need it now vs. activities that could be planned.
11. Concerns were expressed about he maturity of the technology for building a private cloud, above the building block virtualization layers
12. Mapping IT cost for a service to what a user pays. Need to have a good pricing model for IT services to really understand costs and how the internal cloud services are going to be charged for.