• Cloud Model decision is important.  You can purchase cloud computing at various levels.  The most predominant today are SaaS, PaaS, IaaS.   SaaS is Software as a Service which would include the entire stack of hardware, OS, middleware, and application that you need.   An example of this is buying your email service, website service, or SalesForce service in the cloud.   PaaS is Platform as a Service.  When purchasing this, you would receive your hardware, OS and some level of software such as database software, web tools etc.  Your staff would manage the application layer and possibly some of the more unique middleware that your application uses. IaaS is Infrastructure as a Service.  This would provide you the hardware platform including firewalls and networks, possibly load balancers, and some level of security.  This is the most basic offering.  The building of the tools including data base software, middleware, and your application would be your team’s responsibility. At each of these levels clear understanding of what you require must be requested and understood.  Your choices have a direct impact on your team’s responsibilities and the level of flexibility you have with the environments.

• Cloud technology provides relief for CAPEX budgets:  If the corporate strategy for your company is to reduce CAPEX due to Wall Street influence or other issues, cloud computing can be an excellent way to accomplish that.  Moving into a cloud environment can convert a part of your current IT expense to monthly expense payments versus large capital investments.  Using cloud technology within your own company can also maximize the use of large CAPEX expenses and provide additional capacity and easier provisioning.  Also equipment leases can provide you relief from CAPEX expense. 

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A Few Cloud Challenges:

Advances in technology have not yet provided “a free lunch.”  There are always costs to pay for advances in services.   Cloud technology can help you fail faster and more expensively than ever if you don’t understand it.  You need to understand your security requirements even in the dev area, as well as, tracking how much capacity you are truly using versus paying for, and planning for your appropriate budget increases based on development schedules, customer growth, and new customer requirements, as well as, vendor fee increases. 

 
These are only a few concepts to be considered when deciding on cloud computing for your company.  It is the beginning of the discussion, certainly not all inclusive.  Using Wikipedia to understand the latest terms such as “internet of Things” can be useful although never complete. 

  
Remember that if you don’t know where you are going, it will be very difficult to get to your destination.  If you don’t know what you want, it is highly unlikely you will succeed at getting what you need.  When making decisions about your next steps in cloud computing, be sure to partner with an expert in creating your infrastructure vision within your company or with a consulting practice, preferably one that is not tied to cloud computing revenue.