Enterprises are continually under threat of being undermined by the competition. In seeking market leadership status, each internal department is charged with finding opportunities for greater cost efficiency, improved agility, and flexibility. Cloud services feature high on the list of strategic priorities for IT directors, as cloud provides many of these benefits and enables competitive differentiation and innovation by removing many of the obstacles that occur in traditional IT delivery models.
Yet, cloud services are not featured prominently as part of mission critical IT services. Organizations explore and test cloud platforms, issue requests for proposals and, in some cases, business units procure cloud services directly from providers without the knowledge of their IT department. Many of these initiatives are successful and deliver on the value promise made by cloud providers. However, often these projects reach a dead end as organizations elect to move only their non-critical workloads into the cloud, while continuing to deliver critical services from dedicated on-premise environments.