Cloud Control to Major Tom

As I reported on one of my earlier blog posts, Cloud Computing is impacting the Financial Services market in a big way. More than ever financial companies are adopting a cloud computing program to build elastic, scalable, secure and global web services to align with the business and market drivers they are facing. The cloud is providing the mechanism to allow companies to make this shift.

This sounds great, where do we sign up? Before you jump into the cloud here are a few key points to consider to help make your transition to the cloud not only successful but provide your company with the mindset to manage your clouds effectively.

• Avoid vendor lock-in -- Design your solutions and infrastructure with the notion that it could be picked up and moved easily if necessary. Many Cloud Service providers don’t offer a well defined exit strategy so it's very important to develop your own.
• Feature Rich -- Choose a provider that offers the features your business requires to be successful in the cloud. Time to market, features and quality of your product is key to your businesses growth. Focus on those items and allow your provider(s) to help fill in your technology gaps by leveraging solutions like; Infrastructure Automation, Database as a Service, SingleSign-On and/or Key Management.
• Governance -- Let me ask a question, does governance restrict or inhibit product development? Quite possibly the policies and procedures you are trying to implement, is the very thing that is blocking your product from being developed quickly, thus missing deadlines and market drivers. While it is important to offer freedom for your teams to develop and deploy quickly, it all comes at a cost. Some form of governance is needed, finding that balance can be difficult. I lean towards implementing governance for your business to help control costs and usage, rather than blocking product development.
• Cost Controls -- Transitioning to the cloud can be a costly exercise. Dev's have the ability to create environments and IT typically has no visibility into what is being deployed. Invoices arrive and your boss is asking you about the ever increasing costs for this "Cloud thing". It seems the transition to the cloud has become a massive exercise of how to spend money quickly. So what can be done? Introduce technologies that will give you visibility into your cloud environments? Using the governance I described above will allow your IT organization to proactively monitor usage and forcecast costs so your in control. These measures will provide the much needed insight to help identify waste and expose methods to reduce your monthly cloud expenses?