Two weeks ago, Brian Cann and I gave a presentation on "the complete cloud" at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Orlando. Attendance was standing-room-only, with many excellent questions indicating the high level of interest among the audience of government and commercial executives as they make their moves into the cloud.

Our primary message was that creating and preserving cloud infrastructure savings, security and service requires active engagement by cloud clients and their cloud providers to prevent benefit erosion. The time-tested essentials of solid service management—as embodied in approaches such as ITIL®—do not evaporate in the cloud. The key is that either you, the client, takes it on, or your cloud service provider does, preferably in an embedded and automated fashion. Regardless of who does it, it must happen.

Lack of service management is often at the root cause of user dissatisfaction with IT services. In the federal government market, agencies are recognizing that this is a truism whether those services are delivered traditionally or through the cloud.

When considering cloud computing for enterprise production environments, we must all be wary of the many typical "commodity" cloud offerings that only provide physical infrastructure and do not include service management. Such offerings essentially follow a least-cost model that assumes customers will read the documentation, learn the provider's unique language, and determine how to plug the services into the customer's environment.

This led Brian and I to present some additional considerations, such as:

• How will you connect back to your legacy systems that are not in the cloud?
• How will you migrate your applications so they are "cloud aware" to take advantage of the elasticity of the cloud?
• What project discipline is needed to ensure a successful transition to the cloud?

Agencies and all organizations seeking cloud services shouldn't turn to cloud computing with high hopes of saving money on infrastructure and labor, only to take on time-consuming and expensive management and integration tasks by themselves. "Complete cloud" solutions, such as CGI's Federal Cloud Infrastructure as a Service with automated service management and supplemental migration and transition services, help agencies and all organizations enjoy the fruits of the cloud by inducing users to follow procedures that are embedded into the service itself.

Stay tuned for Brian's next blog post, when he'll talk about the top themes and commentary coming from the conference. In the meantime, I look forward to hearing from you on your service management questions.

ITIL® is a registered trade mark of the Cabinet Office