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1. Establish Firm Governance: Cloud adoption benefits from governance and management structures that thoroughly cover processes, workflows, security standards, etc. when evaluating service selection.
2. Inventory Needs: Get a good sense of how cloud migration must support day-to-day operations. Find out from stakeholders and users what they require in terms of access and availability, support, business functions, and mobility.
3. Look for the Five Essentials: For the cloud, these five essentials are on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured services.
4. Promote Automation: Influencers will lend support if they're made aware of how many tedious, time-consuming manual tasks can be automated in the cloud.
5. Mind Your Service Level Management: IT has to stay on top of the provider so specific needs on granularity, scope, availability and more are documented and enforced.
6. Timing Is Everything: Be methodical in your approach. If you migrate functions too quickly without evaluating immediate performance impact, stakeholder pushback could thwart your good intentions.
7. Stick With Enterprise Options: Keep in mind that some cloud services are best suited for consumers. An enterprise requires performance capabilities which include agility and redundant, managed and monitored services.
8. Inquire Into Credentialing: Your cloud provider should have certified engineers running the operation center, ones who understand the big picture and can provide helpful, forward-looking IT recommendations.
9. Don't Overcommit to One Cloud Category: In terms of private versus public cloud, many organizations practice "cloud bursting" by initially using a private cloud until internal demand increases to the point where a public cloud is needed.
http://www.cioinsight.com/it-strategy/clou...ementation.html
