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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.
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 - Map out incident management workflows.
Call #2 - Design categorization and identify escalation points.
Call #3 - Design prioritization guidelines and service-level objectives.
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
List organizational goals.
- Organizational goals
Determine cloud drivers.
- Cloud drivers
Match drivers with characteristics.
- Organizational goals, mapped to cloud drivers, mapped to cloud characteristics
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
Assess workloads for cloud value.
- Cloud value assessment for each workload
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
Assess cloud risk by workload.
- Risk analysis for each workload
Review risks and roadblocks.
- Cloud project risks and roadblocks
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
Determine cloud archetype.
- Cloud archetype
Plot initiatives on a roadmap.
- Cloud roadmap
Draft action plan summary statement.
- Action plan summary statement
Draft goal statement.
- Goal statement
