Some Cloud leaders have declared victory by leveraging the Cloud for infrastructure or software services and using the utility based, on demand capabilities. However, leaders can explore and realize higher levels of reuse and sharing by identifying specific processes that can be transitioned to the Cloud. Moving entire processes into the Cloud is a higher level of abstraction and will have a tremendous impact on the management and utilization of technology services. Planning and execution for the Cloud should assess and transition such processes to realize the benefits of rapid provisioning and deployment.
Dynamic shared processes for the Cloud have to be designed at a higher level by the vendors and they have to be customizable so that multiple consumers can leverage them. Such processes in the cloud are a conglomeration of building blocks that consist of specific services that can be sequenced. The consumer does not have to provision systems or servers and hence the ability to deploy full processes; not just software, infrastructure or platforms can lead to significant cost savings and reduce long term total cost of ownership. Specialized processes that need to be transitioned to the Cloud are good candidates for this transition, examples are back end processes, reporting, authentication etc. Due to the utility based aspect of the Cloud, these processes can be adjusted as needed based on on-going monitoring and can support rapid deployments.