Chapter 19

Planning Your Hybrid Cloud Strategy

In This Chapter

Defining the starting points

Describing the hybrid cloud’s support of innovation

Defining the optimal customer experience

Optimizing for workloads

Supporting a dynamic lifecycle

Assessing costs and benefits

Planning your hybrid cloud strategy is a journey, not a simple set of steps. The right planning strategy is imperative to getting your plan to be operational. So, you need to look at the technical components, the business strategy, and the organizational plan. Remember that cloud computing can offer a dramatic change in the pace and style of computing as well as business strategy. Therefore, although costs will, of course, be imperative, you also need to think about the benefits that may help transform the customer experience. Your overall strategy will include a hybrid of different types and models of computing, so planning will be integral to your path forward. In this chapter, we give you an idea about what to expect as you begin your journey, along with the important issues you need to consider.