Here are the ten questions you need to ask yourself to make sure you give yourself a complete choice when you switch to cloud?

1. Strategic alignment

Firstly, you need to ensure your cloud goals go to your business strategy and long-term plans. I know it is obvious but many times IT folks get blinded by the latest and greatest. Are you an innovator, or is your focus actually on cost savings, limiting risks, and CAPEX to OPEX cost models?

2. Mindset

Migration to the cloud is a change, and you realize its benefits when you have a mindset to embrace the cloud. Have you prepared your mind to do the things differently?

3. Be prepared to change

Sometimes, it becomes tough for enterprises to shift their enterprise workloads to public cloud services due to security, compliance or latency concerns. In-a-box type cloud solutions help to run these workloads on-premise and can offer the same cost structure as the public cloud. Other business may choose to embrace a hybrid cloud model for testing and development to validate the business case of using public and private clouds. So it’s a mix of both and changes over time.

4. Find the perfect partner

Business is not easy to run. You need optimized cloud solutions to run the workload to get the most of the cloud from an economic perspective along with complete data security. Can you find a managed cloud provider to help understand the opportunities that cloud provides along with what is the future of enterprise cloud? They should provide various routes that allow you to extend your current structure so that you can embrace cloud rather than going for the radical change. This will lead to convergence and rationalization, but only when at a point appropriate on your roadmap.

5. The center stage for security and governance

The conversation around Cloud should start here rather than after the deciding of main architecture.

6. Management is critical

Will you have visibility across all of the cloud elements that you have integrated into your infrastructure to make sure they are delivering value, and are catering business requirements on security and privacy? You don’t want cloud test and dev environments to run when not in use – that doesn’t give economic advantage you migrated to cloud for in the first place.

7. Business moves fast; can your cloud portfolio?

It should be able to align with you and have the flexibility to change to take you to the future. You should be able to switch between on-premises to cloud and vice-versa and mix and match a variety of options when you understand the cloud entirely.

8. Are you prepared to be at the cutting edge?

The significant benefit of the cloud is its potential to quickly integrate into new features and capabilities in weeks or months apart from the year-long release cycles.

9. Transparency

if you find you are bounding yourself into a provider, you won’t understand the risk mitigation, and will likely lose the financial and performance gains that you had always thought for.

10. Governance will be your best friend

In case of the audit, down the NIC level, or when you need to check exactly where your data is, will your service provider be part of your problem or the solution itself? It is important to opt cloud in a way that allows room for growth.