When choosing a house, the purchase is about so much more than a building. True, at a basic level, a house is a building with four walls, a roof and interconnections to infrastructure such as power, clean water and waste. But choosing a house is a far more involved and complex purchasing decision than just selecting the building. Buyers consider the travel options, possibly the nearby schools, local shops, access to parks and recreation and of course the features of the house such as the number of rooms, energy efficiency and the size of the garden.
As organisations increase their enterprise cloud computing adoption, the same process as buying a house occurs. The features of cloud computing need to be considered to ensure that the cloud delivers business value. As with a house, the features of the cloud are diverse; applications are the rooms where the business activity takes place, the cloud is also the infrastructure that provides energy to your organisation. Therefore defining the features that make up the cloud estate within the organisation is as essential as purchasing a home that benefits everyone who will live there. The feature set of the cloud estate must benefit all layers of the organisation, providing productivity, efficiency, security, growth and reliability. Together these will ensure the cloud delivers business value.