There is confusion on the murmur and blare surrounding cloud computing these days. CIOs and cloud strategists in an organization may find it very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, at the same time, adopt the right cloud strategy for their organization. For that reason, this article is dedicated to providing you with few guidelines which can be beneficial while defining the required and suitable cloud strategies for your organization.
It is a must for cloud strategists to describe cloud service value in their environment, and explain the needs for their business into viable strategies. This means, strategists need to do thorough analysis of the prevailing IT environment, build road map, and create desirable service level chart for incremental progress to the cloud. The strategists must also create recommendations about key performance indicators (KPIs) as well as layer data lifecycle management around these services using with regard to privacy, compliance, and security.
Obviously, it is advised to avoid designing cloud strategy focusing only on technology. The needs of the business and the business it self should be the focus while designing the cloud strategy. To be encouraged to build cloud strategy with business needs in focus, strategists need to ask the following questions:
– In which way will moving to the cloud benefit the business?
– Does a positive trade-off ever exist between cloud computing options and local storage options?
Honestly, the answers they will get from the two questions above will serve as a succor in maintaining an approach that is level headed to the strategy at the same time building a strong foundation for evolution that will last for long period of time both toward the cloud options and cloud like options that they plan to mature within a given year. For the cloud strategists planning suitable strategy for an organization, there must be a good understanding of the kind of strategy available in the cloud, and making use of that knowledge to find out and utilize the appropriate kind of cloud technology for the benefit of the enterprise. The three main categories of cloud services, which you need to know, include:
– Platform as a service (PaaS) which is responsible for provision of platforms for programming as well as building blocks or tools for APIs that help in creating application and services that are based in the cloud.
– Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the ability for managing, owing or even controlling the essential infrastructure. In order to scale up available IT hardware resources within an organization, infrastructure may be rented.
– Software as a service (SaaS) exposes applications as a service that is running in the cloud infrastructure.
In order to create a cloud strategy that is personalized to the business needs of organization, there may be a need for cloud-strategists to combine one or more of the options available services.
It is important for cloud strategists to go beyond mere theoretical definitions of the the cloud, and focus their attention on making use of convincing analysis so as to deduce a clearer fit between economic and risk profiles, which exist in variety of business situations and make cloud offerings — including cloud storage and cloud backup — to stand out as among the technology strategies of the organization.
