Seeing the Many Aspects of Your Cloud Strategy

You have to think about several issues before sending your organization into the cloud. There isn’t just one approach. You might choose one or more of these approaches at different times for different reasons.

Consider a few simple examples:
✓ Your company is building a new application that will change the way you sell products online. You want to stress test this new application before releasing it to customers. Although you have a few extra resources inside your firewall, they aren’t extensive enough to demonstrate if the new application will really scale. Using a cloud Infrastructure as a Service enables you to test the application effectively.

✓ Your company has run its own email internally for more than 20 years. It takes up a lot of space in the data center and requires a staff of ten people. Money is tight and the CIO must cut staff and capital expenses. The CIO finds a Software as a Service platform that can run the corporate email for a fraction of the cost of running email internally. Your company makes the move and the savings are dramatic.

✓ Your company is building a new but highly experimental application that might transform its business model. It might not be worth spending a lot of money on software and hardware upfront. In fact, if the project succeeds, the new application may be deployed in the cloud (and not within your company’s own data center). Therefore, the company uses a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that includes its own well-designed and fully vetted development environment, new generation tools, and interfaces that allow it to connect to many different environments. No need to pretest all the components provided by the PaaS vendor — they’re well designed and have been tested. The new application built on this platform is completed in record time and deployed to a test group of customers directly from the cloud service.

✓ Your company has started using a third-party SaaS solution for its customer-management application. It has successfully replaced the on premise customer-relationship management package that you’ve been running in the data center for years. Now your company wonders what else could be moved out of the data center into the cloud. How about the mainframe transaction processing system that handles all orders worth more than $1 million? After some investigation, you realize that because the system is only used by a few individuals in the company and the information needs to be carefully governed, the cloud isn’t a good choice.

✓ Your CIO has seen some new software that could solve a serious problem, but you aren’t convinced that the solution is right. Instead of buying a license, your company decides to use it as a service. After six months, it proves valuable. The software company offers you the opportunity to use the Software as a Service or on premise.

As you can see, planning your cloud strategy has many different dimensions — maybe more than what you might have thought about in the past. You need a road map to think about how a cloud strategy can be used to support your company’s business goals.

Source of Information : cloud computing for dummies 2010 retail ebook distribution