Gone are the days waiting for your Service Request Ticket to get fulfilled and to provision desired compute environment. The advent of Cloud gives control to the originator to setup, create and destroy their choice of IT from cradle to grave.

Most IT enabled organization have a support division that provides centralized IT services to each of their Business Units. This support division tries to recover their technology and service expenses via chargeback to their Business Units. Certain IT services like Email, Intranet or Accounting are shared and in common to all Business Units.

Over time some Business Units may decide to opt out of seeking centralized IT services and move their workloads to cloud. Their choice may be driven by costs, speed to deploy applications, control and ownership of environment and a global office presence. As an organization, your enterprise cloud strategy needs to accommodate such a move and at the same time keep reallocated expense costs low for remaining Business Units!

Some key considerations towards your cloud strategy can be:

1. Precise assessment of data center fixed costs, disposition of orphaned assets, determining when it will no longer make financial sense to maintain portions of assets on-premise.
2. New support/Operations playbook for upgraded environment.
3. Additional cost savings due to standardization, integration and upgrades.
4. Revisions to security and compliance policies.
5. Controlled automation driving change and configuration management.