Use an Expert to Help with Cloud Decisions

 
It is essential that you understand your enterprise goals and objectives. You need this information so that you establish a realistic cloud adoption strategy, and just as with enterprise architecture (EA) you want alignment between your enterprise vision and your strategic vision for cloud adoption so that activities and outcomes add value to your organization. Specifically, you want to understand your enterprise goals and objectives in the following areas:

• New capabilities that the business needs to bring to the market in the next 12 months
• Services or applications currently constrained due to time to market needs
• Opportunities to preserve capital or avoidance of operating expense
• Requirements or needs to provide ubiquitous access to consumers, customers, or devices
• Needs for improved scalability

Factoring in your understanding of enterprise goals and needs into the formation of your cloud computing vision provides the business context to make cloud computing transformational for your business. That is, the business use of technology changes as technology related business risk is identified and managed; and IT queues get eliminated as a barrier for creating new business capabilities.

All of this requires you to plan for governing your cloud adoption strategy as it ensures appropriate development with proper controls for progression with business continuity, and upon execution governs implementations so that cloud projects are in alignment with your strategy. The introduction of any new technology or technology paradigm shift creates pressure on the organization. Previously, enterprise architecture may have evolved solely to address internal provided technology solutions, and now it extends to address unique aspects of cloud computing in improving agility, enabling new business models or simply preserving capital investments.