Briefings Direct

The latest BriefingsDirect discussion focuses on one of the toughest balancing acts in seeking the best of cloud computing benefits. This balance comes from obtaining the proper degree of centralization or "common good" for infrastructure efficiency, while preserving a sufficient culture of decentralization for agility, innovation, and departmental-level control.

The requirement for empowering centralization is no more evident than in a large university setting, where support and consensus must be preserved among such constituencies as faculty, staff, students, and researchers -- across an expansive educational community.

But the typical IT model does not support localized agility when it takes weeks to spin up a server, if online services lack automation, or if manual processes hold back efficient ongoing IT operations. Too much IT infrastructure redundancy also means weak security, high costs, lack of agility, and slow upgrades.

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We're joined by an IT executive from the University of New Mexico (UNM) to learn more about moving to a streamlined and automated private cloud model to gain a common good benefit, while maintaining a vibrant and reassured culture of innovation. We're also joined by a VMware executive to learn more about the latest ways to manage cloud architectures and processes to attain the best of cloud efficiencies, while empowering improved services delivery and process agility.

They are: Brian Pietrewicz, Director of Computing Platforms at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and Kurt Milne, Director of Product Marketing in the Management Business Unit at VMware. The discussion is moderated Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.