You should go and grab a copy of the Cloud and Infrastructure Review 2016. Its well put together report on the state of the market and will help you in leading dialogue with clients when your trying to reinforce their cloud first strategy.
There are some very revealing confirmations within it, although you need to do a deep read of it as it has some excellent stats and business considerations in it.
“Fifty-two per cent of respondents told us that their cloud strategies were part of a wider digital transformation strategy”. Most businesses don’t approach implementation like that, its all bottom up and revolves around discussions about VMs, storage volume etc, even if the intent is to be top down. Make sure your conversations are about business change and enablers.
“SaaS was still the most popular way for organisations to kick off their cloud strategies” Most people don’t really get don’t really get SaaS, nor is it the driver for sales , but it can be a really good lever for integration activity. We have a market strategy shift towards microservices and consumption of them, so consulting around this space will offer a lot of opportunity. You need an aligned strategy to the changing marketplace.
“Which cloud vendors (SaaS, IaaS or PaaS) do you use or are you considering?”
The most revealing stat is in FIG. 12 which shows Microsoft running at 68%. Every service in Azure is built on a premise of integration and security, and pretty much any service can be mashed into a new microservice, if not already available as one. Couple this with the close coupling of Office 365 to Azure services, and an ability to throw together Dev Test labs on demand and you have a very holistic toolset for enabling change, with less expenditure on that integration challenge.
Whatever vendor you chose for CLOUD service, make sure you don’t back the wrong horse, oddly in the wrong race, step back from the technology and focus on the business need. You may struggle to find jockeys and stable boys to do the dirty work in a few years time if you chose a vendor with no future and a poor cloud strategy.
http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/analysis/2471059/computing-cloud-infrastructure-review-2016
Get your labs here:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/devtest-lab/
