Empower Your Business With a Proven Cloud Strategy

Cloud adoption has moved faster than the decisions and controls needed to manage it. The result is fragmented deployments, spiraling costs, and poor alignment with organizational needs. Even technically successful migrations are often marked by waste and governance gaps that turn cloud into a liability rather than a strategic asset. This blueprint offers a practical approach to building a cloud strategy grounded in organizational alignment, governance maturity, and pattern-driven decision-making.

A strong cloud strategy aligns deployment decisions, whether rehosting, refactoring, rebuilding, or buying, with proven strategic patterns and antipatterns across security, networking, access control, cost, and workload architecture. Success depends on adopting best-practice patterns (e.g. least privilege access) while avoiding antipatterns (e.g. broad permissions or manual IAM.) A pattern-informed strategy ensures the right choices are made, at the right time, for the right reasons.

1. Start with a strategic framework or risk failure.

Without a strategy to guide workload placement, identity governance, architecture choices, and cost control, organizations may scale their cloud usage but not their cloud value. Strategy is not a delay; it’s a multiplier. A structured strategy rooted in best practices and reusable patterns turns cloud investment into long-term value.

2. Cloud waste is a strategy problem.

Overspending is another predictable outcome of poor cloud strategy. When organizations lack a unified approach, cloud costs balloon due to overprovisioning, shadow IT, and default lift-and-shift decisions. The failure lies with strategic alignment, not cost control.

3. You can’t govern what you can’t see.

Cloud environments often grow faster than the governance structures that are meant to control them, leading to misconfigurations, compliance violations, and budget overruns. Effective governance begins with observability: use tagging, cost attribution frameworks, and platform-native tools create the visibility needed to enforce strategy, detect risk, and ensure accountability at scale.

Use this step-by-step blueprint to take a strategic, pattern-driven approach to cloud decision-making

This research offers a practical framework supported by workbooks, templates, and a roadmap to build a cloud strategy backed by clear principles and informed by the right patterns. Follow this four-phased approach to ensure cloud adoption is structured, strategic, and set up to enable agility and innovation at scale.

Determine your corporate goals and cloud drivers, identify success indicators, summarize your current state, and create your cloud mission, vision, guiding principles, and patterns.
Assess key workloads using a structured tool and consider suitability for various cloud disposition strategies.
Identify and mitigate risks by generating a categorized list of risks, roadblocks, and mitigation measures.
Bridge the gap and create a strategy to inform your execution roadmap, including assigning initiatives and timelines, finalizing a decision framework, and creating a cloud vision statement.

Empower Your Business With a Proven Cloud Strategy Research & Tools

1. Empower Your Business With a Proven Cloud Strategy Deck – A four-phase framework to achieve faster time to value for your cloud investments.

With a clear strategy and repeatable deployment patterns, organizations can accelerate solution delivery while staying within guardrails – shortening the timeline between investment and outcomes. Use this blueprint to build a documented, actionable cloud vision that aligns with business goals. You will gain:

A structured framework for identifying and evaluating cloud-suitable workloads.
A repeatable method for prioritizing cloud opportunities based on value and risk.
A process for surfacing risks and mitigations tied to cloud adoption.

2. Cloud Strategy Workbook – An Excel-based tool to help you assess individual workloads based on their suitability for the cloud and the risks you will face as part of a potential cloud migration.

This interactive workbook guides you through key activities around workload selection, risk, and mitigation to allow detailed strategic planning for cloud adoption.

Evaluate individual workloads for their suitability for different cloud service models.
Conduct assessments for workload placement, management models, risks, and roadblocks.
Translate assessment results into actionable migration decisions and initiative prioritization.

3. Cloud Strategy Executive Presentation – A customizable deck to communicate your cloud strategy to organizational and IT leadership.

Use this template to share your cloud strategy with decision makers and build alignment on next steps.

Summarize your cloud vision, goals, and the rationale behind your cloud model choices.
Showcase key results from the strategy workbook and roadmap tool in a polished, boardroom-ready format.
Demonstrate risk mitigation efforts around people, process, technology, and communication.

4. Cloud Strategy Document Template – A customizable foundation for a formalized, organization-wide cloud strategy.

Fill in this template to document your strategy with a level of detail that will enable effective execution.

Clearly define mission, vision, principles, governance, and support.
Document cloud drivers, architectural decisions, and other considerations across people, process, and technology.
Align your strategy with organizational goals, as well as other relevant IT strategic plans.

5. Cloud Strategy Roadmap – An Excel-based tool to visualize your roadmap and track its progress.

Use this roadmap to manage your short-, medium-, and long-term projects and initiatives.

Generate a visual roadmap populated with specific tasks based on timeframe and priority.
Assign ownership, dependencies, and sequencing to cloud projects for clear accountability.
Visualize progress and maintain alignment with organizational goals through roadmap tracking.

Member Testimonials

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.

9.5/10

Overall Impact

$43,511

Average $ Saved

Average Days Saved

Client

Experience

Impact

$ Saved

Days Saved

Testimonial

Oregon Enterprise Information Services

Workshop

10/10

$34,000

Worst part was our meeting tech (Oregon's fault). The best part was our conversations and the resulting progress. We made a big jump in 4 days.

City of Winter Park

Guided Implementation

10/10

$34,000

Frank is an expert in what he does.

Oregon Department of Revenue

Workshop

9/10

N/A

Nabeel was very knowledgeable and did a great job of getting information out of the attendees. He also explained things very well so the whole gro... Read More

Al Nahdi Medical

Guided Implementation

7/10

N/A

The best part was the instructor's patience and his ability to clearly explain all topics, along with his excellent follow-up to ensure I understoo... Read More

Fernco Inc

Workshop

9/10

$34,000

Best. Ability to have a facilitated discussion on the ERP Application current state on-premises deployment and possible future state Cloud ERP appl... Read More

Belcan, LLC

Workshop

10/10

$34,000

Our facilitator Jeremy was knowledgeable about this topic and made the workshop enjoyable for the group. Great balance of letting our group discuss... Read More

Town of Taber

Guided Implementation

10/10

$25,000

Interfor Corp

Workshop

10/10

$50,000

The engagement delivery has been one of the best workshops which I've attended. The framework guidance is incredibly helpful to address a well-roun... Read More

California Department of Social Services

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

Nabeel is very knowledgeable and patient. I feel things should be progressing faster, but all the delays have been on our end. I like how Nabeel fa... Read More

Jennison Associates

Workshop

9/10

$68,500

I've asked the rest of the team and we all agree that this was a great experience and exceeded expectations. Jeremy moved the conversation along. ... Read More

State of Minnesota - Minnesota State Retirement System

Workshop

9/10

$32,195

Best Part. Analyst was very knowledgeable (Nabeel) Worst Part. Workshop started slow. I think we could've covered more applications for potential ... Read More

City Of Avondale

Workshop

10/10

$65,075

1Path Managed Services, LLC

Guided Implementation

10/10

$19,883

Best Part - Nabeel... Does anything else need to be said about this? Worst Part - I wouldn't say there is a "worst" part. Perhaps, a place to impr... Read More

RiverStone Health

Workshop

10/10

N/A

Jeremy was fantastic at presenting data and keeping us focused on our goals. He was engaging, listened well, and was great at helping guide us thro... Read More

1Path Managed Services, LLC

Guided Implementation

10/10

$6,499

University of South Australia

Guided Implementation

9/10

$32,499

Working with Nabeel on Uni SA's Cloud Strategy was an exceptional experience. It was evident that a cloud strategy was essential, and using tools t... Read More

Daylight Transport, LLC

Workshop

9/10

$129K

Jeremy was an effective facilitator with a strong command of the content and possible options. He led the discussion well and offered doors we cou... Read More

University of South Australia

Guided Implementation

8/10

$64,999

Sharonview Federal Credit Union

Workshop

10/10

$27,880

Extremely thought provoking and engaging conversations. Jeremy was fantastic to work with and extremely knowledgeable!

Oneida Nation

Workshop

10/10

N/A

I think Jeremy was great as a facilitator for our cross-functional group. He was able to pull out a lot of great information from the various stak... Read More

County of Los Alamos

Guided Implementation

10/10

$2,599

great call and info. Solid direction. Looking forward to adding to the above numbers on subsequent calls/engagements.

Cobb EMC

Workshop

10/10

$64,999

Best: Jeremy’s engagement, flexibility, and expertise. Worst: none. Achieved session goals for me.

Collier County Board of County Commissioners

Workshop

9/10

$389K

Very agile, informative, and provided by the experience of Jeremy's insights the "what everybody else is doing or seen" so we do not re-invent the ... Read More

Stockman Bank

Workshop

10/10

$71,499

Washington Technology Solutions

Guided Implementation

7/10

N/A

Good appreciative questions, time-bound proposed way-ahead that acknowledges past prep work.

Health Canada

Guided Implementation

10/10

$4,000

The best part was the ability for the analyst to quickly understand my situation and we could take advantage of this commonality to discuss next st... Read More

Monroe #1 BOCES

Workshop

10/10

$129K

The workshop was fantastic! The feedback from our entire team was highly positive. Jeremy is very versed in Cloud Strategy and kept things intere... Read More

ENERGYUNITED ELECTRIC MEMBERSHIP CORPORATION

Workshop

10/10

$1.3M

Jeremy's ability to engage our team enabled us to maximize the value of this workshop. We never felt rushed to get through the agenda, yet we manag... Read More

Denver Water

Workshop

10/10

$519K

Jeremy is a fantastic facilitator of this topic - he's knowledgeable and is able to leverage prior experiences with other organizations to help us.... Read More

Canadian Blood Services

Workshop

8/10

$95,000

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Infrastructure & Cloud Strategy

Learners will be able to understand the unique aspects of the cloud, evaluate workloads for cloud suitability, address associated risks and challenges, create a systematic cloud strategy, and communicate the cloud vision to their organization.

Course Modules: 7
Estimated Completion Time: 1.5 hours

Now Playing:
Academy: Infrastructure and Cloud Strategy | Introduction

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Workshop: Empower Your Business With a Proven Cloud Strategy

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 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: Understand the Cloud

The Purpose

Understand the cloud components.

Key Benefits Achieved

Determine cloud readiness.

Activities

Outputs

1.1

Align business goals.

Success indicators

1.2

Create mission and vision statement for cloud strategy.

Current state summaries

1.3

State cloud vision, mission, guiding principles, and patterns.

Vision, mission, guiding principles, and patterns

Module 2: Assess Workloads

The Purpose

Select workloads for assessment.

Key Benefits Achieved

Gain a foundation for evidence-based decisions by combining data-driven insights with expert input.

Activities

Outputs

2.1

Identify target workloads.

Completed workload assessments

2.2

Assess workloads using strategy tool.

Cloud placement decision guidelines

2.3

Review results and next steps.

Module 3: Identify and Mitigate Risks

The Purpose

Identify risks and roadblocks.

Key Benefits Achieved

Determine risks and remediation tasks.

Activities

Outputs

3.1

Generate a list of risks and roadblocks.

Categorized list of risks and roadblocks

3.2

Identify mitigations.

List of mitigations

3.3

Generate initiatives from the mitigations.

Module 4: Bridge the Gap and Create the Strategy

The Purpose

Build a roadmap.

Key Benefits Achieved

Create a working document for execution.

Activities

Outputs

4.1

Review and assign work items.

Assigned initiatives

4.2

Finalize the decision framework.

Finalized decision framework

4.3

Create a cloud vision statement

Cloud vision statement

Make confident cloud decisions with a strategy grounded in patterns, principles, and purpose.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.