With so many stories about cloud computing, IT outsourcing, hosting, SaaS solutions and managed services, we should all be well beyond the question of whether organizations should be moving their enterprise applications to the cloud. For those companies that have not yet started to move these applications outside of their own four walls or, worse yet, have yet to develop a plan to do so, a window is ever shrinking on your ability to keep up with your competitors. Why? Because unless your value proposition to your customers is managing data centers, connectivity, routers, firewalls, servers, storage, backups, operating systems, databases, applications, etc., you'll always be a step or maybe even two or three behind cloud service providers that do this day in and day out as part of their core business model.

When an organization moves its enterprise applications to the cloud and it's done right, the benefits are compelling and real. The list of benefits is not short and the following is not meant to be all encompassing:

1. Your IT capital expenditures will be significantly reduced and potentially eliminated. Whether it's data center costs, power, cooling, servers, networking or storage, you will now leverage someone else's investment.
2. Your operating expenses will drop. How significantly? It depends on how much you decide to leverage your service provider's offerings, but from labor to maintenance expenses, you will now be spending a fraction of a larger pool of resources.
3. You'll have greater flexibility or better yet, you'll make your IT group exponentially more nimble than you believed was possible. You'll be able to start and finish projects more quickly. You'll be able to test new initiatives without a significant investment. You will ultimately enable the IT group to react more quickly to the business. This is because of...
4. Scale. You'll be leveraging a service provider that has greater access to technology capacity and IT skills sets than you would have ever invested in or staffed yourself and these skills are going to be both technically deep and broad.
5. You'll gain access to cutting-edge technologies. Service providers excel at continuously testing and implementing new technologies in order to make them as efficient as possible as well as help to create new service functionality and enhancements for their customers. Why are they always doing this? Because it's all they focus on. What will this lead to for you??
6. Improved service levels. This is what every service provider is focused on and where you will start to guide your focus. You won't or shouldn't be having conversations about "how do I better manage my storage," but "how do I improve the experience and effectiveness of my end users and customers who use these applications." This will lead to...
7. A change in focus (for the better). Your IT organization will now focus strategically on enabling the business to move forward and grow versus the back end day-to-day management of an IT infrastructure that a service provider will effectively manage.

We're well into the discussion at this point, but just for clarification purposes, when we're talking about "cloud" here, at a very basic level, we're simply referring to the use of some shared, dedicated or mix of someone else's infrastructure, tools, technology and resources and it's fair to say that the more you take advantage of shared components of these elements, the more exaggerated the above benefits will become. What does that mean? As you begin to engage a service provider, don't try and replicate exactly what you do or used to do with your in-house infrastructure. Work closely with your service provider to allow them to leverage as much of their cloud infrastructure as possible.

Remember, we are now well beyond the "if I should take my enterprise applications to the cloud" question, so let's start to think about the key considerations and process for selecting the right service provider and developing a relationship that will help you achieve as many of the above benefits as possible. So as you go down this road or are expanding on an already existing cloud initiative, think about these items as you engage your service provider:

1. Technology: Not first because it's the most important. Technology is important and it's important for you to understand the underlying technologies that your service provider is utilizing. Why? Because it should be "enterprise class" in terms of its performance, security, scale and supportability. Most service providers will satisfy your requirements on this point, but what will become more important is how a service provider utilizes and manages their technology platform. Learn more about that from your service provider.
2. Security and compliance: This is a discussion, probably quite a few, on its own, but in summary, service providers that manage enterprise applications for organizations have and continue to invest a significant amount of time and money in their people, technologies and processes for security and compliance. This is to ensure that beyond the AICPA reports that have become table stakes for service providers, they are also in a position to help their customers achieve various certifications, including HIPAA, PCI, FERPA and specific state standards, but also meet industry regulations as well. Even more important and valuable to many organizations is the ability to leverage the experience of a service provider to meet these requirements where they may be lacking on this experience.
3. Experience: Whether it's the length of time in business, the number of customers they currently manage, the experience and knowledge of their management team or hopefully a good combination of all three, have a lengthy and open conversation with a service provider about the customers they work with, the types of technologies they have implemented, what they've seen work well and what they've seen not work so well. This will start to give you a feel about how to best utilize (and later on contract with) a service provider and most important leverage their experiences in managing complicated and sophisticated enterprise applications.
4. References: Talk to a service provider's customers. Get a sense from behind the lens what you'll be looking at by gaining an understanding of the customer experience working with a service provider.
5. Service Agreements: Sounds obvious... right? Yes, you should know what service or services are being delivered, what's included in those services, what are the objectives of those services and how will the objectives be reported. What you should focus on with your service provider is identifying three, maybe five at most, key metrics, that are most important to you and to your end users and/or customers that if achieved will ensure the success of the operations of the environment and the service provider relationship. Creating a laundry list of these items for your service provider to report may feel like the right approach but, in the end, if you don't have the time to focus on and react to these reports, you'll lose your ability to adjust the operations, performance and relationship quickly.
6. Relationship: Yes, there is a significant amount of technology and process involved in delivering these services, but don't lose site of the fact that there are a larger number of people behind making sure a service relationship is a success. Get to know the individuals who are delivering these services to existing customers, their managers and, where possible, the senior management team so you can get a sense of the culture of the service provider. You will gain invaluable insight into how an organization can and will react when things don't go as planned and how you can achieve success together.
7. Management Commitment: Can the service provider relationship run on auto-pilot? They sure can and they will. Is that the best result for your organization? No. Your service provider will want to engage you on how the service is working, areas for service improvements, new approaches you should consider, etc., and you should absolutely want to engage with them. Make sure you take the time to leverage the relationship you've just established and take advantage of every aspect that a service provider can bring to bear to help you achieve your goals. You have just exponentially expanded your IT resources... utilize it.

Moving your enterprise applications to the cloud may not be an easy venture, but it will without question be a beneficial and rewarding one for your organization if done correctly. For those of you who have not yet taken the steps to move these applications to the cloud, know that there are many companies and service providers that have already teamed up in very successful ways to lay the groundwork and build the platform for you to leverage to overachieve on the benefits of moving your enterprise applications to the cloud.