It seems you can’t be in IT these days without discussing cloud strategy. For many organizations, this is an imprecise conversation at best. If you are in the early-adopter class, this not only means evaluating several tactical best practices to test, but also a need to quickly evolve your approach based on initial lessons learned. One of the fundamental realities of IT is that we work to provide our customers with a good, if not great, user experience with little to no feedback when things go well. It is due to this that the question of “cloud strategy” is one with high stakes for both IT professionals and the user experience that we are entrusted to protect.

Perhaps the most important question to consider is “What cloud strategy will your network support?” As companies move more and more workloads to the cloud, the idea of ‘Core IT infrastructure’ is shifting to become a hybridized strategy. Pieces of the overall IT systems are housed in private data centers and public infrastructure clouds, with SaaS services that best fit the application. For companies who have made the leap to cloud, the largest concern has become facilitating a predictable and reliable network to ensure a quality user experience every time. IT Operations has to think in terms of interconnecting diverse pools on in-house and 3rd party IT, applications, and data.