The buzz around the cloud is very real. It offers considerable business agility, cost efficiencies and service improvements to IT managers. What the buzz doesn’t tell you is that getting to the point where the cloud brings these benefits to your organization isn’t easy. So the real question becomes: What do you need to keep in mind when integrating cloud computing into an IT strategy?

According to Mike Martin, Senior Vice President, Solutions & Services for Logicalis, a global IT provider, the key to creating a winning strategy is taking a thorough look at your infrastructure, facilities and services—and defining their adaptability to the cloud. And once you’ve done that, you can seek a cloud provider who meets your needs and deserves your trust. “It’s about doing your due diligence,” says Martin, “instead of just jumping in and choosing a provider.”1

Get your head out of the clouds:

Five points to consider asyou develop a cloud strategy

Five key considerations when developing a cloud strategy1. Classify your applications to create business requirements.The best place to start in the cloud journey is by first looking at your applications and classifying them.Rank how your company uses them and evaluate their requirements, including:■ Management requirements—Would offloading increase your ability to innovate instead of fight

fires? For instance, do you really want to be in the business of email management?■ Business technicality—Can they be virtualized? If they can’t be virtualized, how can I support and

maintain them in the long term? What operating support do they have?■ Mission criticality—What are my business-critical systems and the business continuity/disaster

recovery requirements (BC/DR) for those applications and ecosystems? For apps that aren’t on thetop tier of mission criticality, you can develop a lower cost model for outsourcing or hosting in aco-lo environment, or even leave on-prem. For apps in the top tier, you’ll need a higher cost model.

Five key considerations cont. pg. 2

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2. Assess your fixed assets and your data center lifecycle.Do you have fixed assets that you need to leverage to get as much value as you can? Depending on where you are in your own on-premises data center lifecycle, you can determine which assets are at a good spot in their lifecycle to phase out or upgrade.

3. Thoroughly define your security needs.One of the biggest hang-ups people have surrounding the cloud is security. Will the data be safe? Will your services be there when needed? It’shard for anyone to answer these questions when you don’t know exactly what kind of security you need for each service. The best practice is to firmly establish security policies for each application. The policies then become requirements as you seek a cloud provider and make other critical decisions. You’ll want to know your provider’s security measures, as well—in the data center itself, in the network and on the application level.

4. Don’t forget ITSM.It’s easy to assume that moving things to the cloud alleviates the needfor an IT service management (ITSM) strategy—but, according to Martin, that’s not true. “I really do believe,” he says, “that an ITSM strategy is part and parcel with defining your cloud environment.” ITSM is about defining policies and procedures around managing your infrastructure and data center applications, both on-premises and off-site. It includes everything from change management to asset and lifecycle management. It boils down to having a defined process around IT delivery. It is important that you define it internally and then find a cloud provider to help provide that. Some cloud providers will offer ITSM as a service, while other cloud providers will give you the infrastructure for you to apply your own process management around. You have to understand how you are looking to apply internally, and how your cloud providers work within that.

5. Grill your cloud provider.Don’t look at your cloud provider as just as another IT vendor. They’re not.Whatever organization you entrust with your important data and integralcloud services needs to have the entirety of your confidence. So it’simportant to learn all you can about the provider, including:■ The physical data center—What does the environment look like? Is it a

Tier III data center? What are the security policies around that in thephysical data center?

■ The network—How is the vendor providing isolation on network trafficcoming into my environment? Is my environment a shared multi-tenant?Can I bring in my own private network connections, or can I come acrossthe internet to provide a connection to it?

■ Industry requirements—Is the provider certified in SAE-16, PCI, HIPAAor any standard to which your industry must adhere?

Leave no stone unturned—your comfort level and familiarity are vastly important.

Use these considerations to develop your custom strategy.After you have taken an accurate inventory of the services you want to move to the cloud, what type of cloud environment they need, and your organization’s infrastructure and facilities, you can develop a cloud strategy. In today’s business world, many organizations find a hybrid approach to the cloud to be the most attractive. With the diversity of requirements that each service and application brings, leveraging a combination of hosted public and private clouds plus in-house cloud solutions is often the only way to get agility and cost benefits without sacrificing availability and security. “No two cloud strategies are ever the same,” says Martin.1

Five key considerations when developing a cloud strategy,

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View any or all of these titles at

www.us.logicalis.com/dcfast5:

1. Data CenterOptimization andOutsourcing forEfficiency

2. Moving StrategicAspects of YourEnvironment to a CloudModel

3. Strategies for Sun-Setting IT Equipment

4. Network Rationalization

5. Managed Services,IT Automation andModular Computing

1 Moving Strategic Aspects of Your Environment to a Cloud Model, Logicalis, October 23, 2012

www.us.logicalis.com | 866.456.4422

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