Final Question with Chateaux Principal Ken Zimmerman and Cloud Expert Sam Somashekar

English: Breakdown of Cloud Computing Services

Breakdown of Cloud Computing Services (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ken: When you are advising organizations on creating a cloud strategy, do you typically start with interviews to determine what their motivation is to move to the cloud? What other steps do you take to discover options or scenarios?

Sam: Absolutely, I would first conduct interviews to better understand what the business or IT problem is that they are looking to solve. A lot of people want to have a cloud strategy just for cloud’s sake, and that’s not what you want to do. You must still lead with the problem to solve from a business and IT perspective. The cloud as a platform can help to make the solution a reality, so it’s important to find out exactly what the nuances are around the problem. This could include understanding the SLAs, governors, constraints, and limitations. Are there constraints with resources, budgets, or compliance? Depending on the solution, multiple tools and technologies may be involved. For example, if you’re looking to dynamically extend your on-premise IT to the cloud as needed for on-demand scalability you will likely need infrastructure automation tools that can talk to your cloud providers. You may need a single view of the customer or prospect to arm your sales force with all the information available, both from known entities such as invoices, or dynamic entities such as social media. This type of solution may require bringing in sales and marketing automation tools such as CRM. It is also important to understand both your functional and non-functional requirements. Do you have specific performance and scalability needs? These all factor into the decision.

Download your complimentary copy of the full interview here!

This 2 page interactive PDF includes insights on these topics:
– On-premise vs. in the cloud solutions
– Hybrid clouds
– Disaster recovery and business continuity in the cloud and more!

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