Pre-Requisites

Students will need at least a foundational understanding of cloud computing concepts in order to reap the full benefits of this course.

Lessons

An effective cloud strategy is much more than just picking a cloud provider, creating an application migration plan, or having a listing of allowable cloud services. Instead, an effective cloud strategy begins with your company’s business goals and objectives. From there, a cloud strategy aligns those goals with the full set of activities needed to govern, manage, and use cloud services effectively. Here’s the challenge, though: How do you create a cloud strategy without expert knowledge of the technology itself while avoiding costly missteps?

This course equips you with the knowledge necessary to develop a cloud strategy from scratch. Migrating to the cloud is a common initiative or desire in companies but doing so doesn’t magically generate value. Additionally, effectively using cloud technology differs from traditional on-premises computing in several key ways. To help you navigate these issues, this course will begin with the central concepts of cloud computing. Next, you’ll learn how to create a cloud strategy starting from your goals and moving forward to assessing your readiness and evaluating your portfolio of services. Last, you’ll learn how to plan for application migration and successful operation in a hybrid operating environment. Moving to the cloud is a journey that will take months or years, and it’s best you know that up front. That said, there’s a place in the cloud for your company, and this course will set you out on that journey armed for success.

In this Course, You Will Learn How to:

• Improve your cloud adoption practices
• Assess your cloud readiness
• Develop a communications plan for your cloud journey
• Align benefits and risks with desired outcomes
• Refine governance, security, and risk processes
• Evaluate corporate staffing and resource policies
• Apply cloud migration decision framework

Course Outline

Part 1: Fundamentals of Cloud Computing

1. Tenets of Cloud Computing
   • What makes something “cloud”?
   • The five tenets
   • Why the five tenets are so difficult in practice
   • The cloud mindset
2. Cloud Deployment Models
   • Types of providers
     • Public
     • Private
     • Hybrid
   • Combining providers
     • Single
     • Multi-cloud
   • Choosing among provider types
   • Using cloud providers securely
3. Cloud Service Models
   • Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
   • Platform as a service (PaaS)
   • Software as a service (SaaS)
   • Serverless
4. Communicating Your Cloud Journey
   • Share your cloud strategy
   • Don’t ignore the people side of strategy success
   • Stay connected regularly and be available
   • Expect challenges and doubters
   • Celebrate your successes and share lessons learned
   • Exercise: Develop a communications plan

Part 2: Cloud Strategy Overview

1. What Is Cloud Strategy?
   • What it is (and isn’t)
   • Relation to other strategies and plans
   • Once you have one, now what?
2. From Business Vision to Cloud Strategy
   • Desired business outcomes
   • Potential benefits
   • Potential risks
   • The rise of bimodal IT
   • Business-specific factors
   • Exercise: Align benefits and risks with desired outcomes
3. Cloud Strategy Council
   • What is it?
   • Why do you need one?
   • Who’s on it?
4. Services Model
   • Consume
   • Build
   • Broker
   • Hybrid Management
   • Exercise: Develop sample services model
5. Financial Models
   • How pricing works for cloud services
   • Is cloud cheaper?
   • CapEx vs. OpEx
6. Principles
   • Why principles matter
   • Common cloud principles
   • How to choose yours
   • Exercise: Select cloud principles for sample case
7. Workload Inventory
   • The hard work of preparation
   • Exercise: Complete a sample workload inventory
8. Establish Governance Model
   • Importance of cloud governance
   • Layers of governance
     • Enterprise architecture
     • Technical architecture
     • Application architecture
     • Data architecture
   • Risk and compliance
     • Legal compliance
     • Industry compliance
     • Internal policies
   • Cloud center of excellence
9. Staffing, Resource, and Training Impacts
   • Assessment of roles needed and impacted
   • Evaluate corporate staffing and resource policies
   • Exercise: Complete a sample training plan
10. Exit Strategy
    • Why it’s critical to have one
    • Contracts
    • Data ownership and retention
    • Potential risks and issues

Part 3: Beginning Cloud Adoption

1. Cloud Adoption Framework
   • Assess
   • Perform
   • Extend
   • Improve
2. Assess Your Cloud Readiness
   • Initiating your adoption planning
   • Conducting cloud readiness assessments inventorying
   • Interpreting readiness results
   • Moving from assessment to action plan
   • Exercise: Complete a sample readiness assessment
3. Cloud Migration Decision Framework: The 6Rs
   • Replace
   • Refactor
   • Rehost
   • Retain
   • Retire
   • Replatform
   • Exercise:Apply cloud migration decision framework to a sample case
4. Select Your First Cloud Service
   • Prioritize candidate services
     • Select candidates for your first cloud service
     • Assess service criticality of each candidate
     • Assess risk and benefit of each candidate
     • Decide on the first cloud service
   • Architect selected cloud service
     • Cloud native
     • 12 factor app methodology
     • LIFESPAR
     • Exercise: Rearchitect sample architecture for cloud migration
   • Evaluate cost and return
     • Maximize your cloud value
       • Avoid surprise bills
       • Use demand forecasting effectively
       • Trade off space and time to save money
       • Hit your uptime targets without breaking the bank
     • Assess benefits of cloud service
       • Operational efficiencies or agility
       • Changes in staffing and skill sets
         • Operations
         • Development
         • Security
       • Expected cost savings from infrastructure
       • Determine costs of cloud services
       • Assessing impact on staff resources
     • Compute cloud service costs
       • Throughput
       • Compute time
       • Scalability
       • Resiliency
     • Exercise: Estimate cost for sample architecture for public cloud providers

Part 4: Extending and Improving Adoption

1. Assess Hybrid Operating Challenges
   • Development and testing
     • Development toolchain
     • Debugging in the cloud
     • Testing
   • Operations
     • The rise of SRE
     • Moving administration up the stack
     • Aligning cloud service monitoring and on-premises monitoring
     • Survey of SRE vendors and tools
   • Security
     • Incident and event management
     • Auditing
     • Policy enforcement
     • Penetration testing
     • Threat assessment and modeling
     • Vulnerability management
   • Identity and access controls
     • The continuum of identity from on-premises to IDaaS
     • Understand the benefits and trade-offs of IAM protocols
     • Identity as the new edge
     • The hidden costs of identity in SaaS
     • Survey of cloud IAM vendors
   • Environment management
     • Moving from on-premises environments to cloud environments
     • Hybrid environment challenges
   • Configuration management
     • Impact of cloud service models on configuration
     • Storing secrets securely
     • Managing secrets over time
     • Monitoring for drift
     • Survey of configuration management vendors and tools
   • Deployment and release management
     • A new philosophy of release management
     • Separating deployment from release
     • Monitor and recover from failed deployments
     • Data management
       • Implement proper security controls
       • Plan a successful data migration effort
       • Establish audit and traceability
       • Analysis and reporting from the cloud
         • Business continuity and disaster recovery
           • Evaluate business continuity procedures
           • Evaluate disaster recovery procedures

1. Improve Cloud Adoption Practices
   • Conduct regular retrospectives
   • Improve automation
   • Manage workloads
   • Refine governance, security, and risk processes
   • Train and develop staff
   • Monitor cloud consumption
   • Perform ongoing security and risk assessments

 Part 5: Wrap Up

1. Our Cloud Strategy Journey
2. What To Do Now
3. Final Thoughts

Who should attend

This course is for technology and business leaders involved in the development, coordination, or management of their organization's cloud strategy.   

• Senior Executives/Managers
• IT Leadership
• Development Managers
• Development Leads
• System Operations Administrators
• Solution Architects

Cancellation Policy

If a change needs to be made to your public course registration (cancel, transfer, or substitution) ASPE must receive written notice via email at customerservice@aspeinc.com or fax at 919-816-1710. If a cancel or transfer request is made less than 15 business days prior to the class start date, payment will still be due, no refunds will be issued and you will be charged a $200 change fee. Your paid tuition will be available for one year to be used as a credit towards another course of equal value; only one reenrollment opportunity is allowed. Failure to attend the course without written notification will result in forfeiture of the full course price. Student substitutions may be made at any time prior to the start of class free of charge. If ASPE is forced to cancel a course for any reason, liability is limited to the registration fee only.

Training Location

Virtual
Your Address

Your City, Your Province
Your Country