Cloud Strategies: Planning for Successful Outcomes

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Arthur Cole.

The initial rush to embrace the cloud is over, and it seems the enterprise is finally taking a more thoughtful, reasoned approach to the new technology. But this still has many CIOs wondering: How do I craft a successful cloud strategy? And perhaps even more crucial, how do I ensure my cloud strategy won’t end in utter failure?

At its most basic level, the cloud is simply another piece of the enterprise infrastructure. In that vein, things like deployment, integration, ROI and TCO all come into play, although the calculations are different given the unusual price points and CAPEX/OPEX contrasts with standard servers, storage and other hardware-centric platforms…

The first thing to understand when it comes to successful cloud planning is that despite all the hype, the enterprise industry has just barely begun to embrace the cloud. CIO.com says according to the 451 Group, less than 20 percent of workloads will be on public clouds in two years’ time, which roughly represents the drop in private cloud carriage—from 68 percent to 45 percent. So even though most enterprises have taken their first steps on the cloud, there is no indication that anyone is locked into one particular direction. In fact, the very nature of cloud computing offers ample opportunity to experiment with various architectures and use cases, and then reconfigure the environment should initial assumptions prove faulty or data requirements or business goals change…

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