Water’s path from sea level to a cloud is quite a journey and often misunderstood, similar to that of an organizations path as they traverse from a traditional on premise compute model, to public and private cloud adoption. Infrastructure changes have a ripple effect, and impact functions across an organization, not just in IT, everything from executive management, to finance – and often cause unnecessary strife and significant project delays. With the cloud, large capital expenditures are converted into monthly recurring payments, lengthy sales cycles are turned into self-service models, resource intensive POCs, turned into easy to implement free trials – the list goes on and on. These require new strategies to get projects approved, fast tracked and successful – the legacy method of yearly or quarterly budgeting, and lengthy solution testing and analysis no longer applies, but changing that mindset is no easy task.