A new cloud computing study from TheInfoPro, a division of The 451 Group, found that 52% of 109 medium-to-large enterprise respondents believed that fear of change tends to be underestimated when companies decide to mix things up and take new approaches to tried-and-true ways of doing things. Changes are needed in these attitudes for their cloud plans to achieve real success.

While I can't argue with the results of this survey, I think it is the fear of risk to the business that is the primary impediment to cloud migration. Eliminate the risk elements (BTW, risk for both C-level executives and their cloud consultant partners) and you'll eliminate the impediment to migration. What are these risks?

The real business problem preventing many enterprise C-level executives from making faster migration decisions is the actual cloud migration process. How will it disrupt operations? Where will cost end up, including over runs versus budget? When will the project be complete with delays? What should we expect for service levels? In other words, C-level executives grapple with controlling the risk to the business.

For consultants, the risks are reflected in the direct correlation that exists between the complexity and maturity level of the client’s environment and the amount of effort and staff required to accurately determine the client’s current state environment and ability to make informed recommendations for a future state. Consultants grapple with controlling their risk of sub-optimizing users’ expectations.

Both C-level and IT management would make faster and more reliable decisions if they could find a “silver bullet” for risk mitigation. A tool that can specifically identify and integrate all aspects of the current state environment - including physical attributes, costs, service levels, and asset dependencies – and enable leveraging of that information to design “what if” scenarios then automatically create a project plan to deploy this “perfect” future state environment. Of course the “perfect” future environment is one that specifically aligns technology with the business objectives.

There are plenty of tools available addressing aspects of the migration process as “silos of technology”. These include disparate tools to inventory, measure, and/or track all infrastructure items: computing, software, cloud services, network components, etc.

Unfortunately, rendering the enterprise as a single inter-connected ecosystem, although very useful, much desired and highly productive, is not available due to the complexity of time, effort, and expense of manually creating such a view. Therefore, since no “bird’s-eye view” of the connected enterprise exists, before or after almost every change to the environment "tribal-knowledge" meetings are held where each of the company's domain experts sit in a conference room or logs-on to the video conference and dial-in to the bridge to discuss how a change in one place is going to create issues down-stream. This is costly, time consuming, physically taxing, and subject to human error. Automating these tasks is much desired and more efficient.

Each party would benefit greatly from automation. Consultants would benefit through their ability to perform and complete more cloud assessments and migrations faster without needing to hire more staff. At the same time these consultants will better satisfy C-level management's technical issues and concerns related to cost, service level and risk. Everyone wins.

I'm interested in hearing your comments.