Dara Keher, Version 1 CIOAs one of the fastest growing IT services companies in Western Europe, the Cloud is an important enabler for Version 1, giving us capacity on demand and ‘technical agility’ in terms of providing resources quickly and cost-effectively to our support and development teams.

The challenge for me as CIO is to harness the potential of the Cloud while ensuring proper management and governance in line with our existing best-practice service management frameworks.

Pictured left: Version 1 CIO Dara Keher 

Here are my top tips; focused particularly around AWS deployments.

1) Have a plan

Before you provision, plan and architect your Amazon Cloud environment in the same way you would plan your traditional enterprise IT infrastructure.

2) Put process in place

Align procurement, provisioning and change management to ITIL best practice. Agreed SLA’s and procedures which will deliver the technical agility you require while maintaining robust governance.

3) Centralise management

In complex technical environments, central management is a must to effectively manage and control users, security, permissions and cost.

4) Take advantage of high availability

AWS makes provisioning highly available solutions across geographical zones easier and more cost effective than ever before – there’s no reason not to use it!

5) Change the mindset

Remember AWS is elastic, size for now and upgrade when you need to.

6) Cost Control

Monitor and report costs to your AWS consumers, implement cost accountability and a pay-for-usage model.

7) Watch Sprawl – It will happen!

Even with all the right planning, process and management Cloud sprawl will happen; it’s an on-going battle requiring insightful tools and continuous monitoring and reporting.

Confessions of a CIO Using the Amazon Cloud

Version 1 CIO Dara Keher joined the Big Data Group for an interactive webcast to discuss AWS pain points and best practice.

Listen back to the webcast here >>>