On my various engagements, often come to the conversations what are the challenges that I see IT facing and how the cloud innovation can help address lot of those challenges.
As you think about using the cloud, especially Azure, there are some top of mind issues you have to reckon with.
If you’re like most organizations that I know or be into, you have your existing servers and IT infrastructure (either on-premises in your own datacenters or in 3rd part colocation facilities). You also have an IT staff to manage these assets. So, as you think about using the Azure cloud, you’re not thinking of it in a silo – ideally where possible you’d want to integrate the public cloud with existing IT, manage it no differently, and even have applications with parts running on and off-premises.
Latest IDC findings show 40% of enterprises are already adopting hybrid clouds today (source – http://www.infosys.com/newsroom/press-releases/Pages/cloud-ecosystem-integrator.aspx).
You’re also probably running a variety of OSs, databases, middleware and toolsets from multiple IT vendors. Your developers are proficient in multiple languages and your apps are written in multiple languages and frameworks.
In other words, your IT environment is complex and heterogeneous. And you want to make sure the cloud you choose is able to handle your heterogeneous needs.
Next you have to abide by a bunch of security and compliance initiatives. The rest of the business trusts your IT org to run apps in a secure and reliable manner. So you want to make sure the public cloud platform and the vendor who provides the service is using is trustworthy, i.e. has the right experience and expertise, and has necessary SLAs, and security controls in place.
