"Cloud" is a verb

Companies go to the cloud. Although that sounds easy enough, to “go to the cloud” simply is not a trivial task.

First you need to decide why you’d want to go to the cloud in the first place. There are numerous considerations and reasons why going to the cloud can be an interesting option for your company. You can be looking for flexibility and scalability, or for peak capacity, or for access to new technologies that your own IT-organization can’t provide. You may even want to look for a new business model, one that allows you to absorb our IT-costs as operational expense (OpEx that can be charged directly to the business units depending on their usage patterns), instead of sustaining a monolithic IT organization with a fixed number of employees and a fixed volume of hardware (CapEx that requires investment decisions and balance sheet considerations).

There are many reasons to want to go to the cloud, and you need to think this through very carefully. First determine your business needs, and then see how the cloud can support you.

Once you’ve determined that going to the cloud is the way to go, you’re going to need to determine how you’re getting there. And how far you want to go. This is where the rubber hits the road.

Choices need to be made, alternatives need to be considered, plans forged, it will simply take a lot of time to look at it from all angles. Do you merely want to have infrastructure as a service, with your own team still doing all the maintenance and management tasks, or do you want a full “software as a service” model so you can safe significant personnel costs too? Or something in between? And what does that mean for e.g. your applications and their licenses? Or for the way your internal and external stakeholders use the platform?

Again multiple options that should be considered based upon why you wanted to go to the cloud in the first place. Those arguments will help determine the actual implementation decisions.

And then finally, you need to actually do it. You need to execute the shift from internal IT to your cloud provider, personnel needs to be trained, applications need to be migrated, new security procedures need to get established, even careers will be impacted, it’s just a lot of hard work. Very hard work. And in many cases you’ll want to get close support along the way.

Suffice to say that “cloud” is not just a noun, it’s actually more like a verb…