Request Multiple Quotes from Cloud Infrastructure Providers and Vendors

The challenge

The solution

The outcome

Requirements

• 1. Define business goals, outcomes, and success metrics.
• 2. Assess current infrastructure, cloud usage, applications, and technical debt.
• 3. Classify workloads and decide placement: cloud, on-prem, hybrid, or edge.
• 4. Set target architecture and operating model.
• 5. Define cloud principles, standards, and guardrails.
• 6. Establish security, identity, access, and zero-trust requirements.
• 7. Define network, connectivity, DNS, and latency requirements.
• 8. Set data strategy: storage, backup, retention, residency, and governance.
• 9. Select cloud providers, platforms, and key services.
• 10. Create cost and FinOps model with budgeting, tagging, and chargeback/showback.
• 11. Plan resilience: availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity.
• 12. Define automation and IaC standards for provisioning and configuration.
• 13. Set monitoring, logging, observability, and incident response processes.
• 14. Build migration roadmap, priorities, dependencies, and waves.
• 15. Address skills, roles, training, and support model.
• 16. Define governance, policy, risk, and compliance controls.
• 17. Establish vendor, licensing, and contract management.
• 18. Plan for sustainability, performance, and capacity management.
• 19. Create implementation timeline, milestones, and dependencies.
• 20. Review, measure, and continuously improve against KPIs.

Best practices

• 1. Define clear business and technical requirements before evaluation.
• 2. Prioritize security, compliance, and data privacy controls.
• 3. Verify scalability for current needs and future growth.
• 4. Assess integration with existing systems and APIs.
• 5. Confirm reliability, uptime SLAs, and disaster recovery capabilities.
• 6. Evaluate cost structure, licensing, and total cost of ownership.
• 7. Check vendor reputation, financial stability, and customer support quality.
• 8. Ensure strong identity and access management features.
• 9. Review observability, logging, and monitoring capabilities.
• 10. Test performance under realistic workloads and usage patterns.
• 11. Validate backup, recovery, and business continuity processes.
• 12. Confirm portability and avoid excessive vendor lock-in.
• 13. Involve stakeholders from security, IT, finance, and operations early.
• 14. Require clear implementation, migration, and onboarding plans.
• 15. Establish procurement, renewal, and governance processes for ongoing review.