The Burton Group recently
suggested that CIO commit some time to move to the cloud, using this 5-step
process:
"Pre-work: The
objective is to identity key stakeholders and cloud computing objectives. The
adoption strategy requires significant resources to perform business impact
analysis, application assessment, cost analysis, and a vendor selection
process."
- "Business and Application Assessment: The objective is to
determine what applications are cloud ready. This can be done in a
four-part analysis: business impact analysis, application assessment, cost
analysis, and the impacts on the organization.
- Vendor Selection Process: The objective is to
meticulously examine a vendor's service. Cloud vendors details should be
transparent and meet application requirements. The scenario may arise
where the application is ready for cloud, but cloud is not ready for the
application.
- Residual Risk Mitigation and Limit Liability: The objective is to
mitigate unavoidable risk. The best way to mitigate risk is though
up-front planning, exit strategy, and cloud brokers and liability
insurance, but some risk cannot be avoided.
- Steady State: The objective is to inject cloud management
principles into everyday operational procedures. Do this by employing
sound cloud governance procedures and measuring how the adoption strategy
is meeting the defined business objectives."
Certainly nothing-new here, and good advice. However, I would make sure to
include a rather rigorous architectural and strategic process as part of this,
making sure to:
Understand completely the "as is" state of IT, doing a
realistic assessment of what's working and what's not. Often the path is to take a
poorly designed architecture and systems and push them out to the cloud hoping
for a miracle. Take this
time to reassess, redirect, and re-architect.
Never accept cloud providers and private cloud technology as
always the end state. Many
systems work well in the cloud, many do not.
Make sure to consider the people. Retraining and creating a new culture is a huge part
of making this work. If you
forget that aspect, it will fail.
No matter how strong the technology solution is.
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