As part of Enterprise IT, you might have been asked this questions a few times now – “Should we be using a Cloud as part of our data center strategy?”
In order to answer this questions, here is some food for thought…
- Data Center Agility – managing unpredictable demand
- Economic – Capex to Opex, overall cost saving
- Simplicity – Less headache; managing a data center is not your core competency
- Phased approach – maybe move non-production systems to the cloud
- Define Risk – Acceptable risk tolerances for your enterprise might impact scope
- Is SaaS an option – reduce some services that you currently run by using SaaS (HR systems, time/expense management, email, document management etc)
- What internal business processes will have to change if you have services provided in the Cloud?
- Define criteria to select a cloud vendor – technology support, reliability, availability, scalability, security, disaster recovery, market reputation etc
- Which vendors are best suited to address your needs?
- Maybe select 2, one primary and one as a backup – define your strategy
- Define your security architecture – authentication, authorization, role/entitlement management, governance and compliance
- What other regulatory compliance issues do you need to deal with – SOX, PCI, HIPAA, ISOXXXX etc
This is not comprehensive, but helps me start thinking in the right direction…
but then.. u don’t read my blog, so will never know that I had this issue. And of course, no one else has ever faced this or complained … right? ….. 
