Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
A first step towards an Enterprise Grid and Cloud infrastructure is the establishment
of Cluster Grids. Cluster Grids are located within one organizational domain and
do not affect the whole organization. They are a good starting point, as they enable
the companies to accumulate know-how, and to experience the advantages of the
technology with low exposure to the risks.
The next step is to connect Cluster Grids with IT infrastructure from different
organizational domains into an Enterprise Grid. Technically this imposes higher
challenges in terms of support for: integration of heterogeneous physical resources
and data, security and privacy in distributed environments, automation of resource
sharing policies, and communication in a distributed environment. From a human
perspective, a new positive attitude of employees towards acceptance of resources
sharing and adjustment of processes is required. From an organizational and IT
governance perspective, new rules and policies need to be defined that regulate:
the resource sharing and the distribution of management functions among organi-
zational units involved in the Grid as well as security and privacy aspects of data
sharing and communication within the Grid.
The third and forth step is inclusion of external resources as Utility Computing
and Cloud Computing. Also in the last two steps besides technical, additional organ-
izational and governance challenges arise. The establishment of a culture favouring
the acceptance of external resources and applications, the introduction of poli-
cies for choice of external providers, or for regulating security and privacy aspects
related to communication of data to the external provider are some examples of the
possible challenges.
Overall, a successful introduction of Grid computing requires changes in the
employees' culture, attitude, mindset and the companies' processes and IT govern-
ance.
To assure success, a well organized project and change management as well
as a comprehensive communications strategy is needed.
Given the findings above, practical guidelines integrating the technical stages of
Grid and Cloud introduction with supporting change management and IT govern-
ance aspects are proposed below and visualized in figure 14.3:
