Since beginning of 2010, basic cloud models like Private, Public and Hybrid have been well understood by organizations. What seems apparent but should not be is a tendency to marginalize these three models. Your cloud adoption should have some Chaos i.e. a blend of Private, Public and Hybrid to thrive and derive benefits.

Most IT enabled organization’s have a support division which provides centralized or shared IT services like Exchange, SharePoint etc. As they embark on their cloud journey, they are faced with a continuous challenge of profiling applications for cloud readiness, understanding impact of orphaned IT assets in their data center and getting into a holy-grail of better-faster-cheaper way of delivering services using a Cloud.

One way to best address Business requirements is to right size a mix of on-premise, hosted and hybrid solutions that will cater to your organizations cost and security objectives along with its psychological temperament.

Office of the CIO can derive a blue-print by:

• Assessing Network Bandwidth and Storage requirements
• Assessing Non-production environments
• Analyzing re-platform, re-hosting and standardizing opportunities
• Evaluating Out-of-box SaaS and PaaS solution alternatives
• Lowering risks to allow continuous change and deployment of your customized applications in the cloud

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.