Cloud Strategy Planning and Management

This guide will enable you to evaluate the strategic value of cloud computing as part of your organization IT strategy and will give you skills and knowledge to plan and manage a cloud computing strategy.

It includes but not limited to:

• Business Value IT Transformation:

  Moving to a cloud architecture and strategy to achieve business value. Analyse the driving forces behind cloud computing and its evolution. Define cloud computing in terms of NIST's five essential characteristics and four deployment models. Discuss the benefits of cloud computing and potential barriers to cloud adoption.

• Competitive Advantage Strategies:

  Investigate business strategy models to gain competitive advantage for organisations, SWOT/PEST, Porter’s 3 Generic Strategies, Porters 5 Competitive Forces and Porters Value Chain Analysis

• Strategic IT Leadership:

  Emphasize the roles of the strategic IS/IT leaders such as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in planning and managing IT Strategic development in the organization

• Cloud Consumer Strategy:

  Develop a Cloud Consumer Strategy to deliver on strategic business objectives in the business strategy. Perform a migration analysis on consumers workloads based on priority and suitabiity. Create a roadmap for cloud adoption for cloud consumer organisations.

• Cloud Service Provider Strategy:

  Explore the possibilities from a Cloud Service Provider point of view. The architecture of cloud services will be described including an overview of common cloud reference architectures, cloud infrastructures, partnerships and service management. The role & responsibilities of the Cloud Service Provider will be explored e.g. with respect to portability/interoperability, privacy & security.

• Benefit Realisation and IT Governance:

  Managing resources (people, process, technology), to realise benefit from Private/Public Cloud IT services (IaaS, PaaS, PraaS, SaaS),Gartner's 5 pillars of benefit realisation. Analyse IT governance, risk and compliance as a service in measuring the delivery of IT Strategy from Cloud IT Services e.g. implementing COBIT for Sarbannes Oxley (SOX) compliance and other commonly-used approaches.

• Cloud Service Management:

  Cloud Service Management by Consumers and Providers including Business Support Systems (BSS) and Operational Support Systems (OSS)

• Cloud Economics:

  Analyse CAPEX (Onpremise) v OPEX (Cloud) models, supply side (Provider) v demand side (Consumer) cloud service provision and adoption, economic risk of workload migration to a Private v Public Cloud architecture, metering & billing models and TCO v ROI of cloud service workloads.

Recommended Book Resources

Dimitris N. Chorfas 2010, Cloud Computing Strategies, 1st Ed., CRC Press [ISBN: 9781439834534]
Andy Mulholland, Jon Pyke, Peter Finger 2010, Enterprise Cloud Computing - A Strategy Guide for Business and Technology Leaders, Meghan Kiffer Press [ISBN: 0929652290]
Eric Bauer, Randee Adams 2012, Reliability & Availability of Cloud Computing, 1st Ed., Wiley (IEEE) Press [ISBN: 9781118177013]
Joe Weinman 2012, Cloudonomics - Business Value of Cloud Computing, 1st Ed., Wiley [ISBN: 9781118229965]

Supplementary Book Resources

David S. Linthicum 2009, Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Guide: How to Use SaaS, SOA, Mashups, and Web 2.0 to Break Down the IT Gates, 1st edition Ed., Addison Wesley [ISBN: 0136009220]
Charles Babcock 2010, Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution, 1st Ed., McGraw/Hill [ISBN: 0071740759]
Mark I. Williams 2010, A Quick Start Guide to Cloud Computing: Moving Your Business into the Cloud, Kogan page [ISBN: 0749461306]
Barry Briggs, Eduardo Kassner 2016, Enterprise Cloud Strategy, Microsoft Press [ISBN: 9781509301766]

Recommended article/paper resources

Other Resources

Website: Whitepapers and news for the CIO
http://www.cio.com
Website: Gartner Research Website
http://www.gartner.com
Database: CIT's online Library Database
http://library.cit.ie