As organisations of all sizes adopt cloud technology in ever-greater numbers, Microsoft’s e-book gives CIOs and IT leaders in-depth guidance about planning a move to the cloud.
The technology research company IDC has forecast that investment on IT infrastructure for cloud environments will increase by 16.2% this year, whereas traditional enterprise IT spending will fall by 1.8%.
The 109-page e-book, called Enterprise Cloud Strategy, gives detailed advice that’s informed by the real-world experiences of cloud adoption from IT teams around the globe.
The first section of the e-book covers the multifaceted economic case for adopting the cloud, such as cost savings and the ability to build resilient applications rapidly – with the added benefit that they can be scaled up or down based on demand. The e-book also outlines how the cloud can reduce costs for development and application testing, and how organisations can exploit cloud’s ever-growing feature set to gain strategic and competitive advantage.
Other areas covered in depth include which applications organisations should start with when embarking on a journey to the cloud. Microsoft advises creating a catalogue of applications that are managed by IT, with a weighting given to the relative importance of each attribute such as business criticality. From there, IT leaders can prioritise which applications to move first.
Enterprise Cloud Strategy shows how cloud migration has a significant impact on daily operations in an IT department. “Although functionally the requirements of this team remain intact, the mechanics of how many of these functions are performed changes in some important ways,” authors Barry Briggs and Eduardo Kassner state.
Other areas covered extensively in the e-book include how organisation will change. It tackles one of the most hotly debated aspects of cloud, arguing that instead of eliminating IT roles, it will cause those skill sets to evolve. “IT roles change, and become less about rote IT functions and more about high-value contributions to the business of the enterprise.”
The e-book also provides guidance on measuring progress and on thinking about how to think about some of the biggest issues associated with cloud migration: security, compliance, and business buy-in.
The Enterprise Cloud Strategy e-book is free to download – click here.
This article was supplied by Microsoft.
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