Cloud adoptions by businesses have continued to grow in the last few years and the trend continues, according to a Gartner report. However, according to the CISCO sponsored IDC survey, only about 14% of enterprises that already adopted cloud had some level of enterprise cloud strategy in place. The same survey also found that these cloud leaders are seeing tangible benefits from their efforts and on average see an annual benefit per cloud-based application of $3 million in additional revenues and $1 million in cost savings, which “have been largely the result of sales of new products and services, gaining new customers faster, or accelerated ability to sell into new markets.”
While the benefits of a well-articulated cloud strategy are clear, developing such a strategy is not a trivial exercise and requires systematic thinking. The purpose of this article is to propose a general framework that can be used by any organization for developing such a cloud strategy for any cloud initiative, be it at application, product, service, business function, or enterprise level. The proposed framework is represented by a 3-D matrix as shown in Figure 1.