Cloud Computing and business strategies.

Many aspects of organizational management are defined based on a company strategy; thus, it is appropriate and logical for a technology management strategy to be supported by a business strategy.

Firstly, this strategy will lead to defining the management scheme that is most appropriate for the company needs and which will be used in the cloud, whether it is a public, private, or perhaps hybrid cloud according to the specific requirements deriving from that needs, and considering the following aspects: performance, capacity, availability, security, control, etc.

On the other hand, the main concern for a company intending to use cloud services will be information security and the guarantee on the availability of services. In order to deal with this issue, the company’s responsible staff must clearly know about the service criteria and conditions, as well as the value expected to receive in order to hire reliable suppliers. This will be appreciated in clear, concrete and specific contracts and agreements, and these conditions and guarantees will offer peace of mind regarding the use of cloud services.

A good practice regarding this strategy –if a cloud-based services approach has been decided upon– is migrating progressively, from less to more, i.e., first of all, start the process by moving to the cloud those regular services or applications, whose migration does not involve greater risk and effort, such as e-mail and messaging and/or collaboration services. This will allow the company to evaluate the efforts and impacts of the change in the services scheme, as well as the behavior of users and the organization as a whole, to evaluate the economic aspect and make the first costing exercises to determine the economic impact in that regard, as well as to comply with the business strategy.