Times of every terminal connected to all-omniscient mainframes seems to be far away. Nowadays, enterprise users work with several devices (smartphones, laptops…) and their aim is clear: get to the applications and data they need, when they need them.

Current solution toward anywhere, anytime access to business applications is the so-called cloud computing (see previous post about what is and what is not). In fact, is not a really new concept, as integrates concepts as software-as-a-service, virtualization, outsorced Web hosting…

Accepting that this phenomenon will transform IT organizations (today’s mobile, interconnected environments demand new approaches to delivering business applications), as we know now, how can business technology decision makers face it up? Here we find a field guide:

• Select your cloud environment. Decide what type of cloud you need:
• Infrastructure clouds: raw CPU time and storage resources to run your own applications.
• Application Platform clouds:for developers to build and scale their applications.
• Software-as-a-service clouds: provides specific business apps like CRM,ERP…
• Choose a cloud provider. Perform a benchmark to assure good levels of failover, redundancy, resilience, security policies, and test DR capabilities.
• SLA Control as IT’s role. Focus on vendor management: establish service level and service quality to be achieved, and an economic compensation if SLA is not accomplished.  Periodical reporting is needed to review performance issues or outages, remedial actions and lessons learned.

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