Cloud adoption is a marathon, not a sprint

Forrester’s James Staten recently made some interesting points on how organizations are feeling the heat when it comes to ‘doing cloud’. According to James, many organizations are talking the talk when it comes to cloud but in reality are doing little more than virtualizing part of their IT environment. This isn’t surprising given the attention cloud is receiving, everyone is eager to get on-board but it’s also concerning since as we all know, jumping head-first into any major IT project is almost always easier said than done.

As James points out, implementing a cloud environment is part of a journey and it can literally take years to get cloud-ready. Even for smaller organisations, setting up a successful cloud environment will not happen overnight. This view is in-line with the delegate research we’ve recently conducted and highlights that when it comes to cloud it’s all about gradual steps.

Experimenting is an important part of this process which is why James advocates organisations using ‘cloud-in-a-box solutions’ to learn how clouds operate and how far they need to go on their journey to full scale private cloud deployment.

Establishing a private cloud using out-of-the-box offerings is low risk, low cost and allows companies to quickly establish private clouds so they can evaluate the benefits. It also makes it easier for IT executives to achieve senior level buy-in for large scale cloud initiatives at a time when ROI is the name of the game.

We’ve recently announced the availability of the Platform ISF Starter Pack which enables organizations to establish initial private cloud environments extremely quickly and at a cost of just US$4,995. The Starter Park offers organizations a highly cost effective way to start their journey to private cloud, enabling them to explore the benefits and challenges of moving from their legacy IT infrastructure towards a new model of delivering IT.