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2. Managing the long-term and optimal impact of cloud in the broader
context of the information systems strategy.
This level of strategy will be primarily concerned with aligning cloud
investment with business requirements and seeking strategic advan-
tage from cloud provision. The typical approach is to formulate these
strategies following formal enterprise's strategic planning frame-
works to align with the enterprise's business strategy. The resulting
action plan should consist of a mix of short-term and medium-term
application requirements following a thorough review of current
technology and systems use and emerging technology issues.
3. Managing the long-run and optimal impact of cloud in the broader
context of underlying IT infrastructure and application portfolio.
The cloud strategy will be primarily concerned with the technical
policies relating to cloud architecture (and its it within the broader IT
architectures), including risks and service-level agreements (SLAs).
It seeks to provide a framework within which the cloud provision
can deliver services required by the users. It is heavily influenced
by the CIO and IT specialists and is likely to be a single corporate
strategy. Separate federated cloud strategies may be required if there
are very different needs in particular business units.
In practice, all three of these are interlinked and need to be managed accord-
ingly to ensure a coherent and strategic cloud provision.
The planning process must address the following aspects:
• What is the current state of the business in terms of the management
and utilization of current business and supporting information sys-
tem and technologies:
as-is
(baseline/current state) analysis
• What is the desired state of the enterprise in terms of the man-
agement and utilization of business assets and IT resources:
to-be
(target/future state) analysis
• How can the enterprise close any strategic gaps identified in its man-
agement and utilization of cloud as an IT resource: realization plan
• How can the resulting information systems plans be implemented
successfully: go live
• How to review progress through effective business metrics and con-
trol structures and procedures: maintenance
What is clearly evident is that the whole process of strategy development
relies on different groups of stakeholders in the enterprise working together
to assess business and process requirements and the information needs and
the steps toward developing implementable strategy. The caveat to this is
that there are wide-ranging issues that need to be mitigated to ensure that
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