With guidance from the TCBC steering committee and membership, TCBC has established the following focus areas and working groups for 2015/2016. It is our expectation that TCBC will produce a “Best/Proven Practices” document in each of these areas, and several complementary “Spotlight Documents” highlighting ways that Canadian and global organizations adopt or support these best practices within their own businesses.
If you are interested in more information on (or joining!) a TCBC working group, please contact us at working.groups@businesscloud.to.
Process/management issues (4 groups)
- Planning for the cloud/cloud strategy (2 groups)
- Planning for the cloud/cloud strategy – enterprise:
- Description: Cloud is an important component of enterprise IT delivery strategy. What are the key considerations to integrating cloud into the overall IT delivery fabric, and to ensuring that cloud’s increasing presence doesn’t lead to disconnected initiatives that reduce overall benefit and increase security/regulatory exposure?
- Planning for the cloud/cloud strategy– SMB:
- Description: In many ways, cloud is infrastructure for SMBs, which opens new possibilities for IT enablement of business processes. How do resource-constrained SMBs capitalize on hosted infrastructure and application options?
- Skills requirements and development
- Cloud reduces the importance of some traditional IT skills, but it also drives requirements for many new competencies. Which of these are important within and outside the IT department, and what are the best ways of developing/sourcing them?
- Governance, risk and compliance
- In many cases, the key cloud management issue for businesses is governance: how is cloud incorporated within existing governance, risk and compliance structures, and what needs to be done to ensure cloud is a positive contributor to GRC, and not a point of exposure?
- Planning for the cloud/cloud strategy – enterprise:
Infrastructure and IT service/application delivery (3 groups)
- Advanced cloud application adoption and enablement (including collaboration, Big Data, analytics, IoT, mobility)
- Increasingly, cloud is the platform that supports the most compelling next steps in IT. Collaboration, analytics and Big Data, IoT and mobility all draw on cloud capabilities to improve a wide variety of business processes. What are the key issues in supporting advanced applications within an evolving cloud infrastructure?
- Cloud standards and security
- Cloud standards and cloud security are both fundamental to building and delivering cloud services to business users (and customers). Standards and alternative commercial cloud foundations (including OpenStack) are important to creating the core of cloud infrastructure, and security is essential to using that infrastructure in a business context. What should businesses consider to ensure that they have the right foundations for scale and security in cloud-based IT service delivery?
- Delivering cloud via public, private and hybrid cloud environments
- In a world that is transitioning from traditional on-premise infrastructure to corporate IT fabrics that incorporate multiple cloud platforms, defining and delivering cloud infrastructure is more a journey than a destination. What are the key issues in establishing public, private and hybrid clouds within “brownfield” and “greenfield” environments?
- Note to members: we would like to include networking and data storage and backup under this header; we’ve also received suggestions that cloud lifecycle/operations management and software-defined control for cloud be included here…
The business of cloud (3 groups)
- Financing cloud businesses
- Cloud startups have inherent advantages: they generally require limited up-front capital and can scale globally. But what are the keys to obtaining financing for launch and growth?
- Cloud business models, metrics and imperatives
- Cloud offers tremendous opportunities for scale, but successful management of a cloud business requires an understanding of the core business models, metrics and management imperatives associated with cloud success. What should cloud business executives focus on to provide best leadership to their organizations, and best potential to shareholders and customers?
- Cloud go-to-market
- Cloud businesses are lauded for their ability to both provide new ways of addressing existing challenges and for their ability to reduce adoption friction by converting capital requirements to OPEX. However, these new models are accompanied by specific challenges in marketing, sales compensation and management, and channel development. What do cloud businesses need to do to address unique requirements in these areas?
In addition to the Best/Proven Practices documents and Spotlight documents, these subjects will also be addressed in one/more of Community Meetings, a Cloud Bootcamp, a Cloud Symposium and a Business of the Cloud seminar. For more information on these events, please click here
