Measuring the Maturity of Your Cloud Management Practices – VMware Cloud Community

Does your cloud management model align to best practice? Or is it still a work in progress? Knowing where you stand is a vital first step towards building a robust framework for managing public cloud. Learn how to assess where you stand so you can take action to improve. 

I once co-led a best practice program for IT practitioners around building and running an enterprise-scale configuration management database (CMDB) function. My program co-leader would often say: “To have a best practice you first need to have a practice.” That simple saying has stuck with me for years. It seems so obvious, but it carries much wisdom. You only get to best practice by doing something many times and with a strong focus on continuous improvement.  

Achieving process maturity is a parallel idea. Take almost any process in your organization.  Generally, you start out in a state of immaturity and you work hard on improving your abilities. As you do so, you build maturity.

CloudHealth cloud management maturity assessment

Achieving maturity in how you manage public cloud is no different. To help organizations figure out where they stand, the CloudHealth by VMware team released an online cloud management maturity assessment in July. Two months later, the team published a blog with the aggregated results from the first 300 respondents. Overwhelmingly, this first batch falls into the Visibility stage – the very first level of maturity in the model.  

Knowing where you are today is useful, but knowing how to get to where you want to be is even better. Not only does the assessment tool peg your current level of cloud management maturity; it also provides you with peer comparisons and a set of actionable recommendations that can help you move up the maturity ladder. 

Recapping the online assessment tool

The assessment tool shows organizations how mature they are in three key cloud management functional areas:

• Cloud Financial Management
• Cloud Operations Management
• Cloud Security Management

These three functional areas are then mapped against four levels of maturity. The first or lowest level is Visibility. Next comes Optimization, then Governance and Automation, and finally Business Integration. Download this whitepaper to explore the cloud management maturity model in depth, including the definition of these three functional areas and the meaning of each maturity level.

The online assessment tool asks respondents three to five diagnostic questions per management function. The tool uses the answers  to automatically calculate a maturity score for each of the three management domains.   

The output of the assessment is a report. The executive summary provides a graphical representation of your maturity in each of the three management domains, and compares you to your peers (see below). 

Sample output of executive summary dashboard

The report then provides a question-by-question readout that shows your answers for each of the diagnostic questions. As I mentioned earlier, and maybe the most important thing of all, you get a set of actionable recommendations in each management area. With these in hand, you are in a great position to continue to build maturity – which ultimately helps you fully realize the value of your cloud investments.  

What next?