Cloud Strategy

develop a more coherent and well thought out approach towards cloud adoption

Cloud strategy helps an organization:

..to develop a more coherent and well thought out approach towards cloud adoption and provide guidance for implementation plan

Organizations which develop a cloud strategy are more likely to achieve their target business outcomes and better navigate cloud computing challenges.

Before we delve into what is cloud strategy consider some important points:

1. It's never too late for an organization to develop their cloud strategy

2. Its not fair to expect that cloud strategy can address all business challenges

3. An organizations may never move it's entire data center to cloud because of many constraints e.g. data residency regulations, low-latency requirements

4. Cloud strategy may be one of many important strategy documents which originate in different areas of the organization e.g. data center strategy, infrastructure strategy, vendor management strategy

5. Cloud strategy should be aligned with business strategy to establish clear linkages with business disruption, business outcomes and strategic actions: there should be a collaboration between business and IT.

Following are some of the questions which cloud strategy can help you answer:

Cloud models and sharing of responsibilities

Different Approaches for Cloud

1. Re-host - Lift and Shift. Minimum changes to re-host on cloud but limited benefits and cloud nativeness

2. Revise - One step forward by leveraging managed service offered by cloud service provider e.g. database as a service or messaging queues as a service

3. Re-architect - first steps towards aligning the architecture with cloud platform services. Existing code may be retained but rearchitected

4. Re-build - start from the scratch. Develop the application on the new cloud platform using cloud native features

5. Replace - migrate to a software as a service (SaaS) offering e.g. Salesforce

6. Retire or Retain are also possible options

(source: Gartner)