After you have all of the fundamental work completed like your strategy, your current and future IT requirements, and a high level business case created, you now have the means to define the next steps on your personal path to the secure cloud. So, what do you do next?

The next thing is to understand the best approach to the journey based on your specific business and IT priorities. These could be based on urgent problems such as limited growth capacity in the data center, low server utilization, energy limitations, physical space limitations, “end of life” of existing equipment, data center consolidation goals, or many other compelling events. We had all of these events occurring as we began our IT transformation and ultimately our approach to the secure cloud.

Like most organizations, we began with server consolidation and virtualization as the initial implementation steps for our data center transformation. Using automated tools to capture the information, a detailed analysis was performed on the entire server infrastructure including processor, memory, and storage. We realized we were only getting an average utilization of about 12% which is typical in most companies today. This information helped us to scope the opportunity to “virtualize” the server environment. This resulted in four phases to complete our virtualization efforts with the first focus area being our development / test environments. We then phased in our production environments according to the levels of benefits to be achieved, the risks, and the technology requirements. We were able to realize an increase in average utilization above 50%.

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