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On 12 April 2011, the IT Process Institute (ITPI) and CA Technologies co-launched a new book on private cloud computing called Visible Operations Private Cloud: From Virtualization to Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps.

Written for enterprise IT executives and data center managers, the book, which forms part of the Visible Ops series, studies the experience of enterprise IT organizations that have implemented private cloud solutions, and develops a four-phased approach for managing the development and rollout of a private cloud.

The book was co-authored by Kurt Milne, ITPI's director, Andi Mann (pictured above), CA Technologies' vice president of product marketing, and Jeanne Morain, Flexera Software's director of strategic alliances, cloud & virtualization.

The authors identified private cloud key competencies through surveys and interviews with CIOs, vice presidents of engineering and operations, architects, and IT engineering and operations managers from leading global technology, financial services, and telecommunications firms. Their private cloud projects range from mid-sized deployments to large-scale private clouds that encompass thousands of servers.

In an interview with Asia Cloud Forum, CA Technologies' Andi Mann discussed the key competencies of cloud-adopting organizations, the factors that lead to common failures of cloud implementation, and busted the latest myths of cloud computing.

Andi Mann: We [Kurt Milne, Andi Mann and Jeanne Morain] talked about how the space was lacking a realistic, practical guide to taking virtualization to the next level with private cloud, with actionable advice to address the gap between low-level virtualization configuration guides and high-level strategy whitepapers.

We agreed that IT practitioners like enterprise architects, cloud program and project managers, senior technicians, and others needed better insight to help them to deliver private cloud. We also wanted to help them to explain cloud computing both up and down the organization -- to their CIO, CFO, and CEO; and to their hands-on technicians.

Mann: We all know each other pretty well, and all agreed very early to ground this book in a solid fact-based approach, led by the real experiences of the IT professionals we talked to in preparing the book. So the few disputes we had were very short-lived, and very easily resolved between us.

A couple of items did pop up though -- such as where security needed to fit in the private cloud story, for example. We went back and forth on this, trying to decide how to address it. Is virtualization security the same as private cloud security? Is it a delivery component you focus on when you are delivering business-critical cloud services? Do you need to 'do security' up front, even in test and development? Is it a separate item, or do we talk about it throughout?

In the end, the answer was really all of these -- so we address security to some degree throughout, but make sure to devote a whole section of the book to a longitudinal view of virtualization and cloud security.

Mann: I think it boils down to getting the right mix of management technology and standardized good processes.

So having discipline in key technology competencies like service automation, process orchestration, service management, showback/ chargeback, capacity management, and resource optimization -- and obviously virtualization too -- were all clear success factors.

But we also learned that the human side was critical, so we covered topics like how to get executive and peer group buy-in, standardizing and documenting known best practices, seconding a cross-functional multi-skilled team, defining a successful deployment and operational methodology, and communicating success to executive sponsors and others.