Ready or not, here comes the cloud. This is one of the key takeaways of this report, with a close second being, no two cloud experiences are alike. Even more pertinent though, this article will help you use Forrester’s Preparedness Assessment to gauge your organization’s cloud timeline.

First, let’s identify the key factors for creating your cloud strategy: urgency, risk and preparedness. “Not all companies can—or should—embrace the same cloud strategy and the following factors drastically dictate the specifics of enterprise cloud strategies: urgent industry threats to the business, risk tolerance level, budgets and organizational flexibility, strict security policies and regulatory prohibitions and the organization’s preparedness level.” It is important to note preparedness is not the same as maturity or readiness. Preparedness is a measure of how well you have currently established your starting point—regardless of where you are currently on your journey. Preparedness demands that organizations meet certain preconditions before actively pursuing action. With a full understanding of your preparedness, you can calibrate your cloud strategy for maximum results.

Forrester’s Preparedness Assessment for Cloud Computing Adoption breaks down preparedness into three essential arenas: people-related issues, process-related issues and technology-related issues. People issues include Governance, Training, Education and Open Source Involvement. Success among the people are dependent upon four key areas: organizational commitment and preparedness, training and career development, existing skills and cloud experience and the ability to evolve current organizational and skill constraints. Forrester’s Preparedness Assessment maintains that executive commitment is essential to succeed in any domain and that a culture of innovation, availability of budget and an organizational preference for flexibility in budgeting are also major factors for preparedness. In efforts to prepare for cloud deployment, skills training and career development are an obvious must with the staffing. On that note, it is helpful for staff to be familiar with cloud ecosystems and platforms; this will speed up the deployment process.

The process measure portion of the Preparedness Assessment includes effective vendor management and demand management. Forrester finds that the most useful preparedness factor indicator is a healthy relationship between technology management groups and business buyers. Organizations should be looking to utilize mature, tech-centric vendor management skills that are going to accelerate cloud deployment. Other areas critical for cloud preparedness are strong demand management processes and a collaborative approach by tech management. Lastly, it is significant to note that organizations must incorporate an “as a service” mentality to correlate with the pay-as-you-go dynamics of cloud consumption. Along with portfolio visibility, these factors will boost cloud efforts.

Lastly, technology factors mainly include experience with visualization and development and operations. According to Forrester, maturity in these two areas were the primary catalysts of cloud computing. Before successful transition to the cloud, organizations first must identify which workloads are best cloud suited. A portfolio assessment methodology is most helpful for enterprises in making informed judgements in this realm.

After having completed Forrester’s Preparedness Assessment, your organization can then go on to evaluate their results which would be one of three answers: prepared, develop or expect challenges. It is important to note that to receive a develop or expect challenges answer does not mean your organization is not cloud ready; it simply means a different jumping off point in the cloud adoption process.