Cloud Readiness Framework - A framework to support the transformation of IT infrastructure into a technology platform, to enable cloud advantages of agility, scalability, availability, continuous delivery, and efficiency

Two-thirds of all IT companies apply agile methodologies, nevertheless only a few get profit out of all theoretical agile advantages. Even though, they benefit from organizational flexibility, only a few companies can really realize an outstanding reduction in time to market. It is the necessity of transforming the IT infrastructure in a new level of agility, on the level of cloud, where enterprises can benefit from agility, scalability, availability and continuous delivery to reach a new level of efficiency. Prerequisite for this are new requirements in IT infrastructure, even a cloud based technology platform and an environment with the appropriate cloud maturity. Migrating existing applications into a cloud technology platform does usually not fulfil the customers’ expectations. Limiting factors are the organization itself or architectural properties of the existing environment. To profit of all cloud advantages, the architectural and organizational properties must reach an appropriate level of maturity, like service-orientation on all layers. It is a common misperception that migrating existing applications to the cloud is a simple solution that drives down costs in any cases. The existing environment must usually be transformed to fulfill the prerequisites for taking the full advantages of the cloud. By underestimating the transformation process, these prerequisites are often not fulfilled. Furthermore, there exists no systematic engineering approach to support such a transformation, what often results in a lack of knowledge within the transformation project. In order to support transformations into a cloud technology platform, this study develops and verifies a framework to support the transformation of IT infrastructure into a technology platform, to enable cloud advantages of agility, scalability, availability, continuous delivery, and efficiency.