How Deep is Your Cloud Strategy? Cloud Enables Business Transformation

One analyst that really gets the cloud is James Staten from Forrester. He was quoted in an article on Tech Target’s Search SOA site: "If you're going to move an application to the cloud, it makes sense to coincide with a modernization exercise," Staten said. "Those are ideal times to learn about the cloud and then design appropriately."

This is an insight that CSC has had since we launched our first cloud datacenter in October of 2010. Now 13 datacenters later and many private CSC BizClouds all over the world we are still letting the workloads be the guide to the cloud. CSC is one of the few cloud providers that offers subscribers a leading framework and pragmatic services to migrate the right applications to the right cloud.

In our own research commissioned in the summer withour partners Cisco and EMC and conducted by the Technology Business Research Group, we found that among current cloud adopters of retail clouds like Amazon the usage of cloud was very “shallow”. Shallow refers to the selection of workloads for the cloud – not strategic, with little impact on the business or mission. The opposite of shallow is deep usage of cloud where substantial and significant workloads like ORACLE Financials or SAP ERP have been moved to the cloud. Deep use of cloud requires a good understanding of the cloud, confidence in your provider and some assistance with refactoring applications or at the least efficiently migrating applications to this new service delivery vector called cloud.

CSC FuturEdge™ and ACE Factory™ provide companies with an appetite for agile cloud to indulge their desires by transforming how they do work. What’s your plan for the cloud? Are you planning to go deep?

Share your plans and concerns here – we’re listening.