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Cloud Lifecycle Management Techniques and Strategies

Posted by QuoteColo on April 28, 2017 - Updated on May 02, 2017

Like many companies, you’re probably planning on adopting the cloud to host your organization’s digital architecture. While you’ll soon be enjoying the cloud’s many benefits, it’s important that you understand that this asset comes with a number of responsibilities, too, in order to get the most of it. This will require understanding certain techniques and strategies for managing your cloud’s lifecycle.

Initial Cloud Planning

Not surprisingly, you need to begin by thinking about how you will initiate the adoption of the cloud. As you might know by now, you have a number of different options to choose from. It’s more than just deciding between private and public, too. You’ll need to think about how much space you’re going to need, for example.

It’s also important that you think about what a cloud hosting company could potentially do for your company. For the vast majority of businesses, high-quality customer support is going to be essential, especially at the beginning during the implementation process.

Security is going to be another essential feature you have to pay close attention to.

Create Your Cloud Business Case and Develop ROI Inputs

Consider a comprehensive cloud adoption and then compare it to ad hoc adoption as the foundation of your cloud business case.

Doing an ROI analysis is going to be a bit more involved, but it’s no less important. Many companies take months or even a whole year to finish their ROI analysis. Whatever you do, don’t try to go on intuition or guesswork as this will negatively impact your cloud lifecycle in a way that will be very difficult to undo.

Outline Your Cloud Governance Strategy

Proper governance of your cloud hosting platform – from adoption through the entirety of the lifecycle – is going to be essential to your success.

Therefore, you’ll have put together a cloud governance strategy that will make it easy for your company to accomplish its strategy where these goals are concerned. This will require clearly articulating roles and responsibilities for any stakeholder who will be involved in the lifecycle of your cloud.

Put Together a Governing Body

One thing that will make it much easier to properly manage your cloud’s lifecycle is if you put together a governing body who will not just be stakeholders but also people with managing powers.

This body must be empowered to create and manage the following elements of a cloud computing environment:

  • Accountability and Reporting
  • Communications
  • Organizational Effectiveness
  • Policies
  • Procedures
  • Standards Adaptation

Depending on your company’s unique needs, you may wish to add other responsibilities to that list. Just make sure that those in charge are considering every element that could possibly affect your cloud hosting platform during its lifecycle of operation.

Schedule Regular Audits

Once you’ve been through the above steps, you should feel pretty comfortable that proper cloud lifecycle management is now virtually guaranteed. Keep in mind, though, that getting through these steps could easily take a year.

Nonetheless, the last step is to make sure that your governing body schedules regular audits to confirm that your cloud platform is on track to meet your goals, produce the anticipated ROI and otherwise continue to be a helpful asset to your company.

At some point, you should also put together a contingency plan should it become necessary to switch to another cloud provider. If you carried out the first step correctly, this will hopefully never become a problem, but it’s still better to be safe than sorry.

Although they may seem simple at first look, the above techniques and strategies are vital for getting the most from your cloud’s lifecycle.

Categories: Cloud

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