Cloud services continue to fundamentally change the way your organization does business.  Most organizations are using cloud services in the form of IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS.  Despite the skeptics, the Cloud is not going away. The popularity of cloud services has skyrocketed over the past decade. The use of cloud services will continue to grow significantly in the coming decade.

• How does your organization expect to benefit from cloud services?  How will you measure the benefits?
• Have cloud applications been procured ad hoc by business users who now expect IT to manage them?
• Which cloud service model(s) work best for your workloads?  Are you clear about where your responsibilities end and your vendor’s responsibilities begin?
• Does your organization have the skills and training to empower your people to use the cloud effectively? 
• Do you have appropriate governance and guidelines for using cloud technology throughout your business?

The use of Cloud must be business-driven; moving to the cloud is not an IT project. Start with business needs or fall into the unfavorable position of maintaining applications resulting from shadow IT.  An effective Cloud Strategy will ensure that your use of the cloud remains aligned with your business goals, not simply using a solution in search of a problem.   

Trade stressful, ad hoc decision-making for structure around cloud services

Lack of alignment around who, what, and how the cloud will be used within an organization fosters opportunities for disagreements between IT and the business.  Your cloud strategy should carve out the rules for the use of the cloud within your organization:

• Plan to properly leverage your team and enable them to do more with the cloud
• Mitigate risks by establishing proper governance around cloud
• Outline your migration strategy and determine how you will provision, adopt, and monitor the use of the cloud throughout your organization
• Create a roadmap to secure accountability and increase the success of your cloud strategy   

Focus your Cloud Strategy on people, process, and technology:

• Get the right individuals from IT, business, and leadership to the table.  Decisions around cloud strategy should not be made in isolation.
• Governing the use of the cloud is crucial to a successful cloud strategy.  Effective governance will keep data safe, costs in check, the environment safe, services verified, and operations running smoothly.
• Make decisions around getting to the cloud through migration or adoption and how to provision and monitor the established cloud environment(s).

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