• applications. Does your business now depend on applications that require massive amounts of resources, but only for a short period of time?

If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, an on-premise cloud can help. For example, development and test teams can flexibly and securely run their virtual instances using the on-premise cloud's management and encryption capabilities.

3. Design standardized processes for orchestrating self-service IT. After you have identified, priced and associated SLAs with your IT services, you can implement true self-service IT that's fully capable of automating the provisioning and fulfillment of IT services requested by the business. With self-service systems, IT managers have the ability to offer IT services, pricing and measurable SLA to the business in a way that can be measured and enforced. What's more, the delivery of IT services can be customized to meet your customer requirements.

At minimum, your on-premise cloud will need to be agile. An orchestration layer capable of automating standardized process around compute resources ensures requested IT services can be provisioned quickly on-demand.

4. Enable consumption-based billing for your on-premise cloud. The successful transition to an on-premise cloud requires you to know, on a monthly basis, how much IT is consumed and what that amount of consumption costs. Consumption based billing enables a fair and defensible IT chargeback or showback process by delivering a summarized "Bill of IT" to your on-premise cloud customers on the cost, quality and value of the IT services each customer consumes. The Bill of IT, like a cellphone bill, details the services being consumed and the cost of those services in a language your customers understand. Consumption-based billing also improves transparency, provides cost, quality, and value levers to the business, and ultimately builds trust between IT and the business.