One of the largest challenges for large IT organizations when implementing private cloud solutions is the organizational cooperation that is needed across the different traditional IT silos. Many times private cloud solutions force different silos in the organization to work together to provide a self-service interface for the user of the cloud solution. The days of subject matter experts such as network, storage and server teams operating by passing service tickets to each other to build infrastructure no longer meets the needs of a cloud environment. In order to support private cloud implementations, organizations must align across the several technical disciplines with areas of responsibilities that allow open communication and interaction between the different IT disciplines. This organizational change is also a cultural change in traditional IT where it is very common to be organized by subject matter expertise area. Below is a common cloud solution stack with the traditional IT components, which have been circled to show the silos that would need to be restructured to ensure cooperation.
Ultimately this culture and organization needs to be driven by the leaders of the organization. Ground-up approaches to drive these types of organizational changes tend to be challenging since it only takes one non-cooperative part of the organization to ultimately cause this type of organizational and cultural change fail.
