Cloud Readiness Self Assessment

This checklist is designed to assist you in preparing the information necessary to begin your Cloud journey. Save yourself time and money by preparing this information in advance.

1. Total Cost of Ownership: Consolidate all the costs associated with the delivery of your legacy Information Technology for the last 3years. Common costs to consider: (1) Total internal staff costs (2) Cost of networking  (3) Cost of equipment replacement  (4) Insurance  (5) Power Consumption  (6) Leasing  (7) Adhoc Technical Support  (8)  Lost of earnings due to downtime  (9) Management Cost  (10) Use of money cost (11) Software Licensing costs.
2. Storage: How much storage do you require?  Who requires what storage and for what?
3. Networking: Find out who your telecommunications provider is and what network connectivity is available at the sites where you would generally expect to access your Cloud solution.  If there are new places you need to access, then find out if there is connectivity or not.
4. System Management/Monitoring: Most businesses have applications or user experiences that need monitoring to ensure availability, service quality or secure access.  These requirements need to be brought to the attention of the Service provider.
5. Service Self Service: The ability to provision, purchase, and control systems in a cloud environment.  Customers need to work through internally who should have access to this capability and provide this to the Service Provider.
6. Configuration Management: Configuration management tools can illustrate the interactions and dependencies between servers and applications and help ensure compliance with corporate and industry governance rules and regulations.
7. Billing Requirements: Chargeback and Billing requirements need to be provided up front to your Service Provider so that they can appropriately assigns costs consumption of IT resources.
8. Performance/Capacity Planning: It is useful to understand in advance if there are going to be any changes in performance, service or capacity within the foreseeable future.  Understanding these requirements can help you tailor your commercial supply agreement with your service provider.
9. Service Catalog: A service catalog is a list of IT services that an organization provides to its employees or customers; the catalog describes each service, the SLAs associated with the service, who is entitled to the service, and the costs associated with the service.  This will help you to purchase a Cloud solution that best meets your needs.
10. Change Management:  Change is constant in most business.  It is critical that you understand how you want to manage changes during migration and beyond.