Cloud Vision vs Clouded Vision
There’s a sharp difference in the statement. One having the vision to adopt cloud and others having a hazy clouded vision for the same goal. It's an exciting journey at the beginning with all new found love in technology, but there are critical factors one has to keep a watch on the rear mirrors to drive safe ahead.
At the outset, it is beyond choosing a technology. It needs a collective vision towards embracing the road map by adopting new ways to run your IT enterprise. And that starts with one looking beyond moving ‘virtual computing’ load to the cloud or a ‘remote hosting with a twist’.
Collaborating vs Sharing
If you have already managed to adopt O365 or Google Email like platforms and moved your messaging out of your in house legacy infrastructure, consider yourself ahead in the game to move forward with true collaboration in the cloud rather than an erstwhile just a sharing of file over the cloud.
Your cloud adoption vision should be complete enablement of your workforce and maximize the business benefits rather than a piecemeal approach towards subscribing to basic features.
Value-driven vs Extended Infrastructure
During your discovery exercise and developing a plan to integrate with cloud services, it is important to ask the question of value you intend to extract from any service subscription. Most often it is easy to be slid down the path of looking at IaaS as an easy take and justify the vision towards having a utility model with extended infrastructure.
While there is a spectrum of vendors providing such services as an easy quick win, for a better cloud vision it is important to explore services such as Platform and Software as a Service where ever feasible.
Operational Flexibility should be correlated to business value and need to look ahead at the strategic differentiation that moves to the cloud will bring in.
Production vs Other Environment(s)
Well! Why should I not just move my QA/Testing workload and be happy with my cloud adoption?
It is not uncommon we stumble on this point of view from those engaging in first steps towards cloud engagement. And it is certainly not a bad idea always to find the low hanging opportunities. However, if you take a deeper look at this direction, today it is probably happening with different business units with or without an IT organization purview. This adoption needs to be aggregated and governed beyond just QA / Testing.
With a telescope view, these environments don’t ideally exist in true isolation and if you are so considerate of risk of migrating production workload to the cloud, please be certain the security and risk are equally important with QA/Testing that moves with the data of your organization. It is highly likely, there is enough organization data at risk.
As stated above the value-driven exercise to classify your cloud roadmap with different targets will be a good bet inclusive of your true IT production environment that has business value rather take on being just technically adaptive by just moving your non-critical workload.
Business View vs IT Optimization
Well! If an organization is moving ahead to cloud with an IT optimization view, it would be very short-sighted. For any cloud program having executive participation and collective direction is very critical. Does that sound very standard advice? Yes. It does not hurt repeating the right statement often. In legacy, on-premise IT environments the decisions to managing an operational environment are dealt with in IT.
While your organization is on a game-changing journey with moving towards the cloud, it is not a standard CIO direction to subscribe to services. It takes a long haul, inclusive decision making, and long term impact with the business view and their alignment.
Integrated vs Independent
On a hybrid cloud adoption, there are many moving parts to establish a functioning cloud program. One such piece in the puzzle will be how IT Organization will manage and leverage the power of a hybrid model. Considering the fact there is a mature Virtualized infrastructure on-premise and the organization ventures into leveraging the cloud provider for their workloads, it is very important to have an “Integrated” portal to manage the workloads and to have the ability to provision and handle on the lifecycle of any server. Having an independent view of the On-premise cloud manager and disjoint views of external cloud infrastructure may prove challenging with an increase in the size and complexity of cloud infrastructure.