Building a Scalable Cloud Infrastructure Self-Assessment

This short self-assessment will give you a preliminary view into how effectively your organization's cloud environment, management and capabilities are supporting the operations and growth of the business. It will give you an idea of areas for improvement and opportunities to take advantage of existing strengths.

Use this quick assessment as a bellwether. While it cannot provide a full picture of the situation of any given company's cloud environment(s), it can provide a set of questions you can ask to determine areas that are worth focusing on.

Question Title

* 1. How does your organization manage cost optimization in the cloud?

Monthly invoice reconciliation

What is cloud cost optimization?

We tried to be as optimized as possible when we built the environment

We continually monitor our cloud environment, and optimize as needed

Question Title

* 2. How do you decide which workloads to move to the cloud?

We use some SaaS (Software as a Service) tools, so we’re already in the cloud

We’ve migrated (or are migrating) the bulk of our infrastructure to the cloud

We’ve got a nice data center, why would we move?

My team has done some testing in the public cloud…it looks interesting

Question Title

* 3. Who maintains governance over your IT environment to ensure policy and best practice adherence?

We use platform best practices and external oversight to ensure we’re covered

Our engineers are smart, they’ve got it

No one, we’ve got a relatively small environment so that level of oversight isn’t needed

We’ve got a small team that ensures we’re complaint

Question Title

* 4. How do you or your team keep current on changes in the technologies that you employ?

Our environment is pretty static, we don’t worry too much about new features

We attend conferences and trade shows to learn the latest features

We have specific roles on our team that plan our 18 month technology roadmap

We listen to our tech team when they bring us new ideas

Question Title

* 5. How does your team help the business rapidly innovate to bring new ideas to market?

We regularly propose ideas to the business for their consideration

We take direction from the business, we do what they tell us

We don’t interact with the business, we mostly just keep the lights on

We’ve a rapid prototyping environment and mindset to test new business ideas

Question Title

* 6. How does your organization serve customers more effectively while managing costs?

We’ve got a dynamic environment that allows us to scale with our customers, reducing costs when demand is lower

We’ve got a budget and we try to stick to it

Our team had run books to be as effective as possible, they allow for better scaling

We try to use automation where we can to do repeated tasks at lower costs

Question Title

* 7. Get your results

Name *

Email Address *

Phone Number