 Chapter 6: Starting Your Cloud Journey 63 Focusing on efficiency and flexibility Planning for a fabric of services Assuming that you’ll plan for a lightweight approach Monitored and managing everything you do Every service that’s created or any service that’s used needs  to be considered part of your overall cloud environment —  even components such as public cloud services (IaaS and  PaaS). You can’t just worry about the services you own. Any  service that touches an employee, a customer, or a partner  needs to be monitored and managed with a service level. This approach helps the company better serve its customers,  partners, and suppliers in a consistently predictable manner. Don’t over engineer your approach to cloud computing. Make  sure that any service or application that’s a part of your  hybrid environment includes well-defined interfaces (APIs)  that are as standardized as possible. You want a streamlined  approach that allows you to achieve your business goals and  support innovation. Transforming IT with Cloud If your organization expects to be successful in an increasingly  interconnected and highly instrumented world you need to  fundamentally transform the economics and flexibility of your  IT environment. A good place to begin this transformation is  Your environment will incorporate a lot of elements or services  that are available across business units. This prepares you  to be able to respond across business units as well as across  partners. For example, you want consistent fabrics for managing security, data, integration, and business services.  These services should be independent of any specific implementation. Creating this type of best practice establishes  a foundation for everything that you create, buy, or connect to. You don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past. Clouds — whether they’re public, private, or hybrid — have to be  designed to maximize the ability to standardize and automate.  In this way, you have better control over costs and productivity. In addition, this consideration ensures that a standard  approach based on best practices is followed consistently. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any  dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.