In a post on his Wisdom of Clouds blog last week, James Urquhart proposed five phases of Cloud Maturity.
I fully concur with the phases of this maturity model, and with Urquhart's assessment of the current state of enterprise IT on the scale, i.e., most have consolidated, some have abstracted, fewer have automated, and only a handful are experimenting with metering and self service. None have achieved open Internet-based Market capability, yet.
This maturity model is useful, but I can't say I find the first four phase names, order, or definitions to be novel in any way - I've been writing these exact same phases on client whiteboards for about three years.
Maturity Model (MM) Hopping Disallowed
The fifth phase (Market) however, is new and insightful, and it reshapes the preceding four in interesting ways. In other words, if you're on a path to reach Market maturity then certain capabilities must be addressed in preceding phases that weren't necessarily required in preceding models that stopped at Utility. For example, elements of service level management must be addressed in the Automation and Utility phases that were not essential prior to the proposed model. In a pre-Market maturity model enterprise IT could deliver automatic provisioning and pay-for-use to their customer without demonstrating compliance to specific service levels. That won't fly in a price arbitraged cloud Market, so these capabilities important to the Market phase must be built in the preceding phases that correspond to the capability. Maturity models are only useful if the phases inherit all the preceding phase capabilities. If additional Automation capabilities are required to achieve Market capability, then Automation was not really achieved at phase three.
What of Elasticity?
I'm not convinced that this is a comprehensive maturity model, and whether we can fit clouds, both public and private, into one vector such as this. For instance, where does Elasticity fit? Auto-scaling relies on Automation, but would we require it of any environment claiming to be Automated? The pay-for-use implication of Utility does not necessarily mean resources are acquired and released in conjunction with use - metering is not intrinsic to provisioning, and vice versa. Whereas Elasticity, I submit, implies growing and shrinking resources synchronously with customer demand. So, does Elasticity warrant it's own phase in the Cloud Maturity Model? What are the implications of this model for private clouds? Does a private cloud ever reach Market phase maturity?
MM Drafted, Now Where's the Magic Quadrant?
In any case, the proposal of a Cloud Maturity Model is a valuable step in the evolution of cloud computing, and the Market apex of the model seems like a reasonable goal. And there is an army of consultants forming to help enterprises address the climb.
