Cloud Principles

This is a collection of Work in Progress Cloud Principles. These principles are NOT meant to be used as is but as the basis for discussion, selection, modification, and alignment.

All Cloud

• Statement: The future state for the enterprise is to have all IT capabilities delivered via cloud and to no longer own any data centers.
• Rationale: Eliminating data centers will reduce costs and allow the company to focus on business capability rather than IT infrastructure.

Avoid Silo-as-a-Service

• Statement: Avoid Cloud Services offerings that are difficult or impossible to integrate with the other applications in the IT environment.
• Rationale: Silos create disjointed business processes and increase costs. Have a strategy with regards to Cloud Service Adoption

Cloud First

• Statement: Cloud services should always be considered as a first option when evaluating how new IT capabilities are to be delivered..
• Rationale: Leveraging cloud when ever possible will increase agility for IT and the business and potentially reduce costs.

Rehost OVER Replatform OVER Refactor

• Statement: For existing applications choose rehosting over replatforming over refactoring.
• Rationale: Minimize the time and effort required to move existing applications to cloud

Saas OVER PaaS OVER IaaS

• Statement: For new capabilities choose SaaS before implementing on PaaS before deploying to IaaS.
• Rationale: More value is delivered to the business faster by moving up the “cloud stack”.

Workload Cloud Deployment Flexibility

• Statement: Selecting PaaS and/or IaaS services that enable workloads to be able to be migrated from one Cloud Vendor to another.
• Rationale: The flexibility to deploy workloads to multiple Cloud Vendors prevents lock-in.

Workload Deployment Flexibility

• Statement: Workloads should be able to be migrated from on premises to cloud and vice versa.
• Rationale: The flexibility to deploy workloads on premises or in the cloud prevents lock-in.