When implementing cloud services, various technology barriers can crop up such as services taking up to a week to provision or lock-in to a specific vendor’s infrastructure which can be costly. Here at Abiquo we’ve worked hard to ensure we overcome this.

Our platform is compatible with multiple hypervisors and we are regularly running customer trials where we have a cloud service up and running in less than a day. In some cases however, the biggest challenge won’t be the technology but rather the internal politics that need to be navigated in order to move a cloud service from a test lab into production.

Most IT projects require sign off at a senior level and there are few organisations these days where cloud isn’t on the agenda for C-level executives, particularly if they are looking for ways to reduce costs. Delivering a true self-service experience to your users or customers can be a  political minefield that needs to be navigated.

A survey that we recently conducted at VMworld showed that self- service cloud isn’t available to 85% of users and I suspect that there are many system or network administrators who are not keen to lose control of what they have created over the last few years. Each technology stakeholder will have built and configured their part of the environment. They are currently in control and know they can meet the SLA’s which they have signed up to.

There are also likely to be processes and procedures that many feel “work” today, and they will be reluctant to put in the effort needed to adapt to a new cloud model. A cloud model should be about doing the up front configuration once so that it can be used many times without constant input from administrators.

Technology is not the barrier here and any good cloud model should provide self-service to users (or customers) whilst maintaining the control that any organisation needs. That control should take the form of restricting users to a set of resources or controlling the parts of the infrastructure that they are allowed to use. Naturally, any cloud orchestration is also going to need administration delegation through role-based privileges.

At Abiquo we’ve recognised some of these political challenges and our 2.2 release builds on this functionality. If you can demonstrate to your internal stakeholders that controlled self- service is possible then rather than being a barrier it’s seen as a viable avenue. Administrators as well as consumers should be sold the benefits that a cloud service will bring.

If you are creating a cloud service then everyone using it needs to fully understand who owns what, and who does what in the environment today so that you navigate the internal politics and the stakeholders cast their votes in your favour.