Someone, somewhere at your organization is discussing cloud. In strategy meetings someone has said “Let’s move it to the cloud.”
Don’t Put the Cart Before the Horse
The first question you should ask at your company is “What are we trying to accomplish with the cloud?” Too many organizations start investigating cloud options before identifying desired business outcomes.
Without knowing the answer to this first question, it is difficult to define the ecosystem for your cloud. And the second question is “What is the ecosystem you need to enable in your cloud?” The third question is, how will you get there and what is your strategy? An all too often unasked part of that question is, “do you have the skills, knowledge and resource availability to take this on?”
The harsh truth is that cloud adoption is moving from early adopters to a mainstream competitive advantage. In response, many companies have already started a move to a cloud, whether it be private, public, or hybrid.
In many organizations, individual groups throughout the business already have some IT workloads in the cloud without an enterprise direction for why they should be there. For example, because development organizations may move faster than infrastructure teams, many companies have already placed some development workloads in the cloud.
Also, a move to the cloud doesn’t necessarily mean a traditional environment is going away anytime soon. It simply means that many organizations will need to determine how to attach a front-end, cloud-enabled service onto their existing IT portfolio. In other words, how can the cloud run a portion of your application workload? Secure, agile, digital enterprises that can use traditional IT and new IT — such as cloud — will be the most effective and successful in the future because they will have the flexibility to cope with changing market conditions in a timely manner.
Here are the conversations covered in the article:
- Conversation #1: What Business Outcomes do we Want to Achieve?
- Conversation #2: What Do We Mean by ‘Cloud’?
- Conversation #3: What is Our Strategy for Getting There?
- The Payoff: How to Drive Business Value Once You are in the Cloud
