The infrastructure questions that need asking early

Infrastructure procurement in the cloud-based model offers speed, with performance and provisioning being key benefits. The process can be nearly as frictionless as purchasing from Amazon, but this convenience may mask issues that arise during deployment and operation. Organizations must consider the operational impact of infrastructure choices, as migration and management can be more complex and costly than anticipated.

Key factors include migration effort, skill shortages, and unexpected cost growth due to usage spikes or capacity upgrades. To mitigate these challenges, it's crucial to establish clear roles and responsibilities between the customer and provider. This includes defining day-to-day management, incident response, support escalation, and capacity addition processes.

Additionally, buyers should recognize that infrastructure services depend on physical data center capabilities, which have gained importance due to increased demand for compute capacity, particularly with AI workloads. Understanding the availability and scalability of these resources is essential for successful deployment. Involving relevant stakeholders, such as engineering, security, compliance, finance, and business teams, from the outset helps ensure all requirements are considered and potential issues are identified early.

This collaborative approach enables a clearer alignment between the infrastructure decision and the desired business outcomes. When evaluating potential providers, buyers should define the problem the new environment aims to solve and ask critical questions about success metrics, scalability, manual intervention requirements, incident support, ownership, and escalation handling.

By thoroughly addressing these infrastructure questions early on, organizations can better navigate the complexities of cloud adoption and avoid costly surprises down the line.