Our thoughts on the future of digital innovation and the cloud.

 /  Invero

What is a Cloud First Strategy?

The term “Cloud first” strategy really started to enter IT nomenclature in 2010 and according to Google Trends has been increasing in popularity in the last couple of years. Then in February 2011, the US government released their ‘cloud first’ policy to outline the benefits of cloud computing, a decision framework for migrating towards the cloud and to drive cloud adoption across the US government. The policy was introduced by Vivek Kundra, the U.S. Chief Information Officer, with the backing of the White House.

How does this apply to your organization? Many of the benefits outlined in the US government’s cloud first strategy apply not just to government organizations, but to any company that wants to reduce costs or improve efficiencies through its use of information technology.

Below is a summary of some of these benefits in three key areas from the US Government strategy document.

Efficiency

  • Improved server utilization in excess of 60 to 70%
  • Aggregated demand and accelerated system consolidation
  • Improved productivity in the areas of application development, application management, network, [infrastructure], and end-users

Agility

  • Leveraging “as-a-service” solutions (software as-a-service (SaaS), platform as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure as-a-service (IaaS), etc.)
  • Real-time or just-in-time scalability (increase or decrease) of capacity based on changing demands
  • Improved responsiveness to organizational needs and changes

Innovation

  • Focus resources on service management rather than asset ownership/management
  • Cloud technologies encourage an entrepreneurial culture
  • Ability to leverage emerging technologies much more quickly
  • A ‘cloud first’ strategy essentially means to ask yourself “why shouldn’t we build [application/service/infrastructure] X in the cloud” as opposed to “let’s build this the way we always have.” Why wouldn’t you want to achieve even some of the benefits outlined above?

Consider developing a ‘cloud first’ strategy for your organization and be prepared for the changing evolution that is upon us. We at Invero believe that any organization that is not considering the cloud in their upcoming IT strategy is missing the boat and will ultimately fall behind their competition.

Here at Invero, our mantra is ‘cloud first.’

We don’t own any servers, we seek out SaaS and PaaS offerings for any business problem that we are trying to solve and we use IaaS for any custom applications that we need to build. We are a professional services firm focused on helping our customer achieve the same benefits that we get every day out of the cloud. Contact us today to discuss your needs and see how we can help you.