Special Guest Post from Trevor Bunker, Chief Technology Architect, CA Technologies

What matters the most to enterprise architects as private clouds take shape at their organizations? The same issues that always matter: standards, repeatability, governance and structure.

Yet, I would say that all those things matter more than ever with private clouds. They are not, after all, just highly virtualized data centers times 10, and cannot function — as many virtual environments have managed to do — by fitting old and perhaps loose operational processes into a new paradigm. The private cloud is too dynamic, too invested in the concept of constant change, to get by with out-of-date configuration items or less than rigorously controlled change-management processes that only increase risk.

The agility of a private cloud cannot be compromised by lags in delivering IT services that result from poorly documented, automated and orchestrated processes across platforms, applications and IT groups. Private cloud ecosystems must be architected with an eye to controlling everything: how applications fit into the new infrastructure; how resources are automatically reclaimed from discontinued services; and how charge-backs are handled in order to avoid overreaching by business units.

Support for moving these principles from paper to private cloud infrastructure has been lacking, however. For the enterprise architect, private-cloud development work has been akin to freehand-sketching of a draft on a vast, blank canvas — a lot of time spent on figuring out which brushes to use and what colors go where.

To check out more from CA visit: http://www.ca.com/us/cloud-computing.aspx