“If you don’t plan for cloud adoption in your organization, you don’t establish a vision for the future and actively work towards it. It’s either already a source of conflict and inefficiency now, or it will become so in the future.”

“There’s no one true cloud operating model. The best model will depend on your overall I&T model, business objectives, corporate culture, along with the peculiarities and quirks of your organization, including leadership strengths and weaknesses.”

“Even though there’s no single best model, good models share a number of common traits - general consensus, executive sponsorship, clear allocations of responsibility, and mechanisms for collaborative decision making and sharing of best practices.”

“At the core of good cloud operating models is what for many organizations will be a mindset shift in the delivery of IT, business outcome and execution.”

“Almost all organizations will find benefit in a cloud-optimized management style, which means you don’t change your applications, but you do optimize your infrastructure design for the cloud.”

“Jamming cloud computing into overworked technology silos is least likely to succeed. Build an evolutionary cloud operating model with C-level sponsorship and clear lines of responsibility.”

“Establish a cloud center of excellence to provide cloud governance, brokerage and transformation capabilities.”

“Regardless of your organization’s drivers for cloud adoption, you need to evaluate and calculate cost upfront. Even if it’s just to make sure it wouldn’t be insanely more expensive than you anticipated, you still have to do this work.”

“Don’t use cost as your biggest factor in cloud adoption, especially the reason to migrate. Make it a “nice-to-have” benefit alongside core drivers of agility, flexibility, innovation, etc.”

“Don’t assume something will be cheaper or more expensive than your current solution. Do the hard work of calculating the total cost of ownership and return on investment.”

“Evaluate over the long term, preferably five years. Qualitative benefits and quantified  return on investment are often not realized in the short term.”

“Start to identify where you can realize some further savings. Build the foundation for your cost governance if you haven’t done so already.”

“Prioritize investment on the most impactful activities, such as those with the highest savings. 80% of the savings are often achieved with only 20% of the time investment.”

“The edge is the physical location where things and people connect with the networked digital world. Edge computing is part of a distributed computing topology where information processing is located close to the edge.”

“Through 2025, 50% of edge computing solutions deployed without an enterprise edge computing strategy in place will fail to meet goals in deployment time, functionality and/or cost.”

“There are five elements to an effective edge computing strategic plan: establishing the vision, determining use cases, identifying and managing risks, building and maintaining standards, and managing execution.” 

“For the foundation of an edge computing strategy, understand enterprise strategies that will require edge computing to be successful, and ensure the strategies are linked.”

“There are four imperatives driving computing to the edge: latency, data gravity, semi-autonomy, and privacy and security.”

“Identify how the drivers of edge computing relate to your industry and business – for example, healthcare is very focused on privacy and security, while defense is focused on semi-autonomy.”

“Proofs of concept (POCs) are important, especially with the huge number of first-of-a-kind deployments or highly competitive solutions. The edge computing strategy should include how to best test the boundary limits of a POC.”