Five Steps to Becoming a Cloud-Ready Company

“To cloud or not to cloud?” is an important IT question for many companies. With so many factors involved in migrating services to the cloud, it’s essential for organizations to take inventory of where they are and where they want to be. ClickSoftware vice president of cloud services, Udi Keidar, shares five tips for becoming a cloud-ready organization.

Click through for five tips for organizations wanting to become cloud-ready, as identified by ClickSoftware vice president of cloud services Udi Keidar.

Understand the business objectives and goals, and align this to the IT strategy. For example, we often cite cloud as having lower costs, but not all organizations are actually aware of what their costs are. Sometimes costs are hidden between departments, etc. So first, do a review and understand your actual current costs, then compare cloud costs.

Make cloud a strategic business decision. Get executive, especially C-level, buy-in and sponsorship. Then have this sponsorship go all the way down the ranks.

Be ready for change. Switching to a cloud environment will take some adjusting. It won’t be a “painful” shift, but it will take some time and energy.

Be ready to compromise. For example, service/upgrades will be easier, but you may need to give up a little richness or robustness in the product. But remember, cloud makes you more agile.

By letting go of a little control, from the IT perspective, you actually gain quite a lot:

• Lower costs: lower IT management, lower IT equipment, free software upgrades, monitoring tools included, etc.
• More agility
• Time to market
• Ability to focus on your core business/service: This means you can focus on your business, instead of focusing on IT. Let the IT experts, for example Amazon Web Services, focus on the technical aspects, and you run your business.
• Provide better service-level agreements (SLAs), be quicker, etc.