If you’re an IT manager struggling to put together a cloud strategy, you might want to put a chef hat on. Gartner has come up with a novel approach for devising a cloud strategy: think of it as a restaurant meal.
Chef image from Shutterstock
Crafting the menu
As a chef working in a restaurant, you have to put together a menu and there’s so many ingredients you can incorporate in your dishes. Same goes for cloud computing, according to Gartner vice-president and fellow Daryl Plummer. There are a number of options and deciding which applications and workloads to put into the cloud can be challenging.
“Characteristics such as volume of data or culture and skills are just a few of those that will help in the decision making. Remember, you can have some workloads that do not go into cloud computing,” Plummer said.
Gathering the ingredients
The ingredients that go into meals can be likened to different levels of cloud services, providers or workloads.
“Consider a balanced menu with a variety of courses and complementary flavours rather than three main courses. More courses also generally equal smaller portions, and we can generally only consume the same amount in any one sitting,” Plummer said. “In cloud computing, we need multiple providers to complete our cloud strategy, but do not spend too much time having providers duplicate the same sets of services, except as backup.”
Preparing the meal
Prep work is invaluable when it comes to finalising your cloud computing strategy, much like when you get down to cooking a meal. You need to think about governance and the security posture in your organisation when using cloud services.
“All organisations should at least monitor the use of services to see how effectively they are being used,” Plummer said. “… Many businesses and organisations will find that they are more secure in the public cloud than they are in their own datacentres if they just apply the right policies and procedures to maintaining their responsibility to being secure.”
[Via Smarter With Gartner]
Comments