The world is moving to the Cloud. This is no longer an aspirational statement. It is no longer a ‘future prediction’ statement. It is in motion. The business case for transforming one’s IT organization to a Cloud based organization has been made. The primary reason this has become a reality at this point in time is because the reasons to adopt the Cloud have moved beyond that of primarily being cost savings, to that of become a Cloud Enabled Business. A Cloud Enabled Business is one that leverages the Cloud to deliver Business Services and Capabilities that are not possible without the Cloud. It is a Business that looks at a Cloud not as just a vehicle to move from Capital Expense (CapEx) to Operational Expense (OpEx), although that is a compelling reason, but looks at the Cloud as a set of IT services that provide Infrastructure and/or Platform as a Service, allowing the Business to deliver evolutionary Business Models to the marketplace.

In this blog series I will discuss and share my experiences as I work with my clients who are migrating to the Cloud. I will focus on a reality of that Cloud – it is Hybrid. Unless the business is a ‘born on the cloud’ business, where it will end up, starting from a traditional infrastructure based business, will be a hybrid world – a world which will have traditional Infrastructure, and the Cloud, provided by multiple vendors, all co-existing. This migration is a journey, a transformation which is requires several critical decisions, changes to systems, operational and governance processes, application delivery models (DevOps), and culture. We shall discuss them all.

In Part I of this series, I discuss the Evolution of Cloud Consumption models – an evolution from ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Cloud that was just Infrastructure-as-a-service, to myriad options. This post is posted on zone.com and can be accessed here.