Rethinking Procurement

Procurement strategies vary between traditional legacy IT and the cloud. In particular, cloud is dynamic. New features and services are continually added, and prices are reduced as economies of scale are passed to customers. Flexible acquisition processes help enable us to get the latest innovations at the best prices.

Educating Internal Stakeholders on Buying Cloud

We must have conversations with all relevant stakeholders to ensure a smooth transition to cloud. In particular:

  • Security Professionals: should consider how they can get the security assurance needed through third-party audits and attestations.
  • Human Resources: need to think about training or retraining staff to use new systems or develop new skills.
  • Finance: needo think about the internal spend controls they want to put in place to manage spending.
  • Program Managers: need to think about the shared responsibility model and how they can deploy new projects that exploit the greater visibility and control they have in the new cloud environment.

Buying the Cloud

The cloud can be bought in 2 different ways:

  • Direct: use terms designed for a commercially available service and purchased as a commercial item service offered without labour hours. This is simply done by accpeting the AWS Agreement with standard T&Cs.
  • Indirect: purchased from a CSP partner/reseller, negotiating a customised agreement with that organisation.

Separating Infrastructure from Services and Labour

Successful cloud strategies separate cloud technology provided by a CSP from hands-on services and labor, or other managed services needed to use cloud technology.