To compete and thrive in the face the market chal­lenges, organizations need to embrace Digi­tal Reinvention. Over the past two decades, businesses have worked through a digital Maturation. As digital technologies emerged, companies progressively digitized processes and functions as they tran­sitioned from analog to digital.

Digital Reinvention goes much further. Combining multiple tech­nologies, including cloud, cognitive, mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT), Digital Reinvention rethinks customer and partner relationships from a need-, use- or aspiration-first perspective.

The enterprise Visionaries and leaders of the industries have ten­dency to achieve their objectives bet­ter than their peers by doing things differently. They breathe the oppor­tunity and grab it to implement as re­sult they are usually the pathfinders for new markets; and they accelerate away from competition by creating efficiencies.

Cloud provides an ultra-flexible way to run services and try out new things without jumping through the usual hoops of IT provisioning.

CIOs need to carefully plan, evaluate their cloud Journey

How can your organization define its successful path to the cloud? Here are some of considerations that needs to be done, when investigating before moving to the cloud.

Identification of Business and spe­cific objectives to achieve

Today’s scenarios Cloud comput­ing has become so much hype, with many marketing compaigns most of CIO wants to ride on the big wave. It is very important to know your strategy and business objectives to achieve.

What's more, when moving to a public cloud, some organizations simply accept an out-of-the-box or cookie-cutter version of a cloud provider's SLA, This is a common mistake that stems from the miscon­ception that the cloud automatically provides scalability, resiliency, reli­ability and recoverability. Cloud computing has multi­ple flavors it is imperative to know which one suits your objective.

Cloud Computing Offerings that needs critical evaluation before way forward.

Alignment with an open cloud ref­erence architecture can help your CIO deliver on the promises of the cloud while using a stair-step ap­proach to cloud adoption – from on-premise to hybrid to full cloud computing. Some companies find their own path by constantly reeval­uating their needs and shifting their focus when necessary – making the move from running a data center to delivering real value to stakeholders, for example.

Service-level agreements

It is very crucial to ensure cloud pro­viders meet expectations and objec­tives that you are expecting. A strong cloud SLA may not just be an an­swer. Organizations should not only negotiate SLAs, but understand their impact from both a technology and legal perspective.

But most comforting cloud ex­haustive service-level agreement and both the parties trying to put one of the major clause for the cloud provider is the promise to keep your applications up and running 24hrsX 7 days, avoiding headache of data center management and skills management.

Scalability

Most common mistake with cloud installation is determining the exact performance issues. It is always very difficult to assess reason for system performance degradation. Especially if a business develops an application in-house and then deploys it to the public cloud, IT must be able to distinguish potential infrastructure issues from application issues. This helps the organization determine whether the cloud provider -- or its own application design – or its band­width is responsible for degraded performance or other issues.  Although we all know the "Cloud infrastructure provides the ability to scale an application horizontally, but only if the application is architected to leverage that ability.

Accelerate processes and optimize cost

Recognizing exceptional business growth, organization needs embark on a path to major transformation that powers greater agility and com­petitiveness. It is very important to choose the solution that best meets organization needs, and implement and support it moving forward. It is always easier to leverage on to cloud, that enables to support the chosen solution, ongoing maintenance, training, and system issues as they are the responsibility of cloud pro­vider. This really helps relinquish­ing managing the infrastructure and skills resourcing to help focus on the core business.

Harnessing tactical and strategic opportunities

It is always difficult to train or deploy right resources for a short duration. Cloud makes it possible hire right re­sources from any location of world. For such opportunities cloud allows your strategic business to secure in­frastructure as well as recruit and on­board those hard-to-find resources by applying a managed services con­tract to run your cloud model.

In summary, it is absolutely neces­sary that the consumer of cloud ser­vices needs to know exactly how the service is going to be used and best possible advantage is exercised from the service. Similarly, the provider needs to ensure how this is provided to consumer.

The selection of Cloud comput­ing decision has to be taken with careful consideration and stringent review/understanding of service level agreement. There is need to consider control mechanism, moni­toring of services used, aggregation of data and application of different sources, cloud deployment and life­cycle. There needs to be absolute un­derstanding and disclosures between the provider and consumer.