Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition  60 Planning the Successful Journey After you understand the business strategy and the technology  requirements, you need a broad set of cloud options to support changing business needs. You also need an ecosystem of partners that can help you integrate your resources  together. Make sure to have a roadmap and plan that takes  you from an inflexible, slow-paced environment to a dynamic  elastic environment that cloud services provide. This sounds like common sense, but too often business and IT don’t collaborate on planning for the future. Successful  companies are able to view IT and business as a strategic  partnership. Planning for the cloud contains two parts: These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any  dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. ✓ Managing the overall service level of the combination  of all computing services inside and outside the firewall: While IT management has long focused on meeting service levels within its own data center, the requirements are now expanding with the hybrid cloud. As this  evolves, IT has to incorporate all these public, private,  and data center services into a virtual environment that’s  managed as though it were a single system through an  integrated service delivery approach. ✓ Managing configurations, licenses, and the usage  requirements for services:  Every environment that  becomes part of the hybrid cloud environment includes  system requirements that have to be managed in a different way. IT needs to have deeper control over how  configurations relate to each other and how systems  coordinate their services. ✓ Ongoing support of security and governance:  Security  and governance issues become more complicated in a  hybrid world. IT has to create a security fabric and governance framework that supports both IT and business  integrity. ✓ Providing cloud integration services between clouds  and traditional on-premises applications:  Each business  unit tends to focus on the applications that support its  business. IT has a unique opportunity to take a holistic  perspective on integration across the extended enterprise.