Define Your Cloud Vision

Make the most of cloud for your organization.

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Contributors

Issy Ben-Shaul, CEO & Co-Founder, Velostrata
Vishal Ganeriwala, Senior Director – Product Marketing, Citrix
Kenneth Libutti, Chief Information Officer, Palm Beach State College
Eric Montagnino, Network Manager, Palm Beach State College
Carisa Stringer, Director – Product Marketing, Citrix
Nabeel Yousif, Executive Consultant

Your Challenge

The cloud market is exploding: 95% of organizations are experimenting with or running applications in Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and a slew of software vendors are pushing their customers toward Software-as-a-Service offerings.
Executives are crying for cloud-first strategies and championing lofty digital transformation initiatives.
Executives often see the cloud as an outsourcing opportunity, which doesn’t take into consideration its true value proposition.
Organizations jump to the cloud before defining their cloud vision and without any clear plan for realizing the cloud’s benefits

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Base migration decisions on cloud characteristics.
Address the risks up front in your migration plan.
The cloud changes roles and calls for different skill sets, but Ops is here to stay.

Impact and Result

Evaluate workloads’ suitability for the cloud using Info-Tech’s methodology to select the optimal migration (or non-migration) path based on the value of cloud characteristics.
Build a roadmap of initiatives for actions by workload and risk mitigation.
Define a cloud vision to share with stakeholders.

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should define your cloud vision, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Define Your Cloud Vision – Executive Brief

1. Determine the value of cloud for your organization

Align organizational goals to cloud characteristics to provide a framework for assessing the value of cloud. List and group organizational goals, map organizational goals to cloud drivers, and map cloud drivers to cloud characteristics.

2. Determine cloud value and action plan for workloads

Assess the value and risks of cloud for each workload and evaluate potential action plans.

3. Address risks and roadblocks

Tackle potential risks front and center in your cloud vision and execution by creating a risk register and developing mitigations.

4. Clarify vision and roadmap initiatives

Plot your cloud project initiatives on a roadmap and distill your vision into a three-slide presentation.

Guided Implementations

This guided implementation is a seven call advisory process.

Guided Implementation #1 - Determine the value of cloud for your organization

Call #1 - Align organizational goals, cloud drivers, and cloud characteristics.

Guided Implementation #2 - Determine cloud value and action plan for your workloads

Call #1 - Review cloud value assessment.

Call #2 - Review 6Rs assessment.

Call #3 - Review risk assessment.

Guided Implementation #3 - Address risks and roadblocks

Call #1 - Review risk register and mitigations.

Guided Implementation #4 - Clarify vision and roadmap initiatives

Call #1 - Review action plan summary statements and goal statement.

Call #2 - Review initiative roadmap.

Book Your Workshop

Onsite workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Module 1: Align Organizational Goals to Cloud Characteristics

The Purpose

Align organizational goals to cloud characteristics.

Key Benefits Achieved

An understanding of how the characteristics particular to cloud can support organizational goals.

Activities

Outputs

1.1

List organizational goals.

Organizational goals

1.2

Determine cloud drivers.

Cloud drivers

1.3

Match drivers with characteristics.

Organizational goals, mapped to cloud drivers, mapped to cloud characteristics

1.4

Select workloads for analysis.

List of workloads for analysis

Module 2: Evaluate Workloads

The Purpose

Evaluate workloads for cloud value and action plan.

Key Benefits Achieved

Action plan for each workload.

Activities

Outputs

2.1

Assess workloads for cloud value.

Cloud value assessment for each workload

2.2

Evaluate workloads with 6Rs framework.

Action plan evaluation for each workload

Module 3: Assess and Address Risks

The Purpose

Identify and plan to mitigate potential risks in the cloud project.

Key Benefits Achieved

A list of potential risks and plans to mitigate them.

Activities

Outputs

3.1

Assess cloud risk by workload.

Risk analysis for each workload

3.2

Review risks and roadblocks.

Cloud project risks and roadblocks

3.3

Develop mitigation strategies and work items.

List of mitigation plans and work items

Module 4: Refine Vision and Roadmap

The Purpose

Clarify your vision of how the organization can best make use of cloud and build a project roadmap.

Key Benefits Achieved

A clear vision and a concrete action plan to move forward with the project.

Activities

Outputs

4.1

Determine cloud archetype.

Cloud archetype

4.2

Plot initiatives on a roadmap.

Cloud roadmap

4.3

Draft action plan summary statement.

Action plan summary statement

4.4

Draft goal statement.

Goal statement

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this Blueprint, and what our clients have to say.

Client

Experience

Impact

$ Saved

Days Saved

Testimonial

New Mexico Department Of Health

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

City of Surrey, The

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

City of Alexandria, VA

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

City Of Mesa

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

Peabody Energy Corporation

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

Breakthrough

Guided Implementation

6/10

N/A

University of Lethbridge

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

SAF- Holland

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

Very knowledgeable and thorough.

Pacific Dental Services

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

n/a- I appreciated the presentation.

City of Moreno Valley

Guided Implementation

10/10

$13,236

Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agencies

Guided Implementation

8/10

$9,000

Ulster BOCES/MHRIC

Guided Implementation

10/10

$1.32M

120

UCLA

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

Kenan Advantage Group

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

Teodora was extremely helpful and gave me a clear understanding of the workbooks that interested me. However, due to a time constraint on my side, which is pushing out my project a little further, we are temporarily tabling this engagement with InfoTech. Once I'm able to resume, I'm looking forward to working with Teodora.

City of Colorado Springs

Guided Implementation

9/10

$66,183

Best - Jeremy was clear and concise in providing his information. Worst - The topic is quite complicated. We will need to implement more methods to get our final state fully deployed. But we knew that. So, it's no big deal. Jeremy's input will be a big part of our analytical efforts.

Government Employees Health Association Inc

Guided Implementation

8/10

$13,236

Not understanding the relationship between the two documents I pulled from InfoTech

County of Napa

Guided Implementation

8/10

$1,985

WGroup

Guided Implementation

10/10

$33,091

Canadian Grain Commission

Guided Implementation

10/10

$5,000

UCLA CENTER FOR DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Guided Implementation

7/10

$661K

Best: structured process for thinking through our workloads, needs and risk tolerance so we approach cloud decisions objectively. Worst: There is a big leap from the point where the diagnostic spreadsheet tools leave off and you have to create your strategy document. I think this is too big a leap to make as a GI -- more guidance on how to move from diagnostic results to strategy points would be welcome.

Discovery, Inc.

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

Good tips on tools to look at for solving our problem. I appreciate the industry insight.

UAP Inc

Guided Implementation

8/10

$20,500

Fred was very proactive in scheduling the follow up meetings and his knowledge and experience with the Cloud were very helpful to us.

New Mexico Department Of Health

Guided Implementation

3/10

N/A

Oregon Department of Administrative Services

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

Wolf & Company, P.C.

Guided Implementation

8/10

$11,912

all All was excellent

UAP Inc

Workshop

8/10

$50,000

Overall, we were pleased with the Tools, advice and workshop deliverables.

Enterprise Service Center- FAA

Workshop

9/10

N/A

Industry Training Authority

Guided Implementation

8/10

$5,000

Jeremy was right on the ball and helpful in guiding the process and giving feedback. The cloud strategy templates weren't terribly helpful - for instance, a "cloud first" strategy showed on-prem being the default choice in a cascading decision process. Whole engagement was helpful.

North American Corporation

Guided Implementation

9/10

$132K

good overall high level input, I like that John stated in a very straightforward way that Azure should be our preferred destination given our Microsoft-centric environment....I think the three of us on the call felt that reinforced our instincts....

Kindred Healthcare Operating, Inc.

Guided Implementation

10/10

$132K

110

No bad parts. John appears to be very experienced and he anticipated most of my questions. I look forward to working with him more.