“The Cloud is a means of accessing IT as a service which sits alongside any on-premise capability and does not necessarily replace it,” he states.
“Whilst Service Models have become more familiar in terms of Software-, Platform- and Infrastructure-as-a-Service and deployment models defined as Public, Private and Hybrid, the reality is that experience, expectation and common sense all point to the fact that any one organisation will access IT in any combination of on-premise and in-cloud, and through any combination of Service and Deployment models.
“To this end it is essential that organisations are able to clearly assess for each project or application which scenario best achieves their objectives and how that fits within their wider and long term IT strategy,”
Andy continued: “In order to understand the best fit of cloud to any given opportunity it is important that organisations are able to make a practical assessment of the criteria that will help define the options possible.
Notable examples of factors that influence choice can be summarised as:
•Nature of application/solution being evaluated
•Uniqueness of process or data needs
•Relevant Industry regulation
•In-house skills available to organisation
•In-house operational capacity available to organisation
•Scalability and predictability of solution over time
•Capital expenditure limitations
•Time to Market considerations
•Level of integration of solution with other business applications
•Efficiency of solution vs available network capacity
“Market messaging today tends to over-play vendor specific messaging about platforms or, too often, paint cloud as a panacea. Whilst neither approach are necessarily incorrect in very specific circumstances, they downplay or risk ignoring the practical considerations facing organisations adopting cloud services and can lead to a more cynical view of claims made and therefore, fail to embrace the reality that cloud is part of an IT strategy and not often the whole IT strategy,” concluded Andy.