 Chapter 6: Starting Your Cloud Journey 59 Gaining IT acceptance Managing cloud services Many IT professionals are concerned about the growing popularity of cloud computing. What’s the impact on their  jobs? Will a self-service and highly-automated cloud computing environment mean that IT professionals will have little to  contribute or manage? It isn’t surprising that IT would be  concerned about the transition from traditional computing  to private and hybrid clouds. However, the reality is that the  hybrid world is one vital component in an overall computing  strategy. Overall, whether we’re talking about a public, private, or data center service, they’re all components of the core IT  environment. So organizations can’t think about each service  in isolation; instead they need to think of it as a set of unified  services that have to be managed in concert. Application developers and operations teams will benefit from  the best practices approach that can be leveraged from the  various cloud deployment models. However, to ensure a successful cloud journey, IT has to manage several key  responsibilities: These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any  dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. ✓ Building shared services based on a service oriented  approach:  To enable a hybrid environment to predictably  support evolving business requirements, IT needs to be  able to codify and then create well-designed business  services with well-defined interfaces. These documented  services allow the business to create new applications  and services quickly and deploy them in many different  situations in the new hybrid world. ✓ Consistently managing the synchronization of data  center systems of record with data stored in cloud  environments:  Data is foundational to an effective hybrid  cloud strategy. Data resides in all the key applications  and systems that are supported in these environments.  Therefore, IT needs to be able to provide effective management of common definitions and rules on an  ongoing basis.