Cloud Scenarios at Your Fingertips

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If you don’t know the scenarios for the Cloud, it’s hard to make the case for the Cloud.  Whether you’re a Solution Architect, Enterprise Architect, Business Leaders, IT Leaders, CIO, analyst, etc., you need to know the pains, needs, and desired outcomes so that you can rationalize the technology more effectively.

What you’ll find below are collections of scenarios large and small that will help you see the full landscape of the Cloud within the Enterprise landscape.  When you have the scenarios at your fingertips, you can better evaluate business strategies or technical strategies, as well as create more effective business cases, because you understand the pains, needs, desired outcomes, as well as the benefits that go along with each scenario.

 

Business and IT Scenarios for the Cloud

 

Category Scenarios
Business Scenarios

Achieve cost-effective business continuity Create new revenue streams from existing capabilities Decrease power consumption Decrease the time to market for new capabilities Easily integrate new businesses into your organization Improve operational efficiency to enable more innovation Improve the connection with your customers Provide elastic capacity to meet business demand Provide Enterprise messaging from anywhere Reduce upfront investment in new initiatives
IT Scenarios

Business Intelligence Cloud Computing Consumerization of IT Corporate Environmental Sustainability Innovation for Growth Low-Cost Computing in the Enterprise

For details on each of the scenarios, including a description and key benefits, see:

 

Cloud User Stories for Business Leaders, IT Leaders, and Enterprise Architects

Here is a robust collection of User Stories for Cloud Enterprise Strategy.

To do a deep dive on the pains, needs, and desired outcomes from around the world, I created a round up of user stories for the Cloud, from the perspective of business leaders, IT leaders, and Enterprise Architects.  I included many CIOs from several large companies in different industries to get a broad perspective.    I ended up with more than 50 user stories of the pains, needs, and desired outcomes for the Cloud in the Enterprise.  Note that while the list is a bit dated, many of the core user stories are still highly relevant and actually evergreen.

With a prioritized list of the user stories for the Cloud, I then grouped them into a simple set of categories:

  • Awareness / Education
  • Architecture
  • Availability
  • Competition
  • Cost
  • Governance and Regulation
  • Industry
  • Integration
  • Operations
  • People
  • Performance
  • Planning
  • Risk
  • Security
  • Service Levels / Quality of Service
  • Solutions
  • Sourcing
  • Strategy
  • Support

Cloud Scenarios Hub on TechNet (Public and Private Cloud Scenarios)

If you haven’t seen it, TechNet has a Cloud Scenarios Hub.

I like the focus on scenarios – it’s a great way to bring together a problem and a solution in context, while pulling together all the relevant guidance.  It’s a focusing anchor-point in action.

I created a simple index to the Public and Private Cloud Scenarios.

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