What Key Considerations Should a Cloud Strategy Address?

Creating a cloud computing strategy will establish a road map to achieve your vision for a transformed enterprise. First, your organization must coalesce around a common scope and perspective for the cloud. Consider these two perspectives:

• Cloud, the industrialization of delivery for IT services, is a new consumption and delivery model inspired by consumer Internet services. This model is enabled by service automation, virtualization, and standardization via self-service, economies of scale, flexible pricing models, and workload-based IT resource provisioning.
• Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable resources (such as networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with reduced management effort or service-provider interaction.

Each of these definitions reflects an accurate view of cloud through a different...