The thought of many an IT person may just be to play things safe. Why bother investing in anything if the solution is immature and if there isn’t a Holy Grail fix to my problem? That’s true of Cloud Suitability, in which there isn’t yet one common cloud foundation for all of your infrastructure elements or applications, and there are simply things that will be appropriate for the cloud and things that simply aren’t.

But when what matters is the ability to go faster and save money, isn’t that a direction worth pursuing? That’s the sentiment of Comerica EVP & CTO George Surdu, who joined us on our Viewpoint “Cloud Suitability and Transformation” and explained why although he’s walking before he’s running, he’s not hesitating in building his solution internally and looking for that hybrid sweet spot.

“We are taking baby steps in certain areas, but on the other hand, we have a lot of confidence that this technology is going to pay off in a big way down stream,” Surdu said. “I believe very strongly that we’ve got to put our toe in the water.”

Having that experience can pay off in the learning process, providing you the insight into pitfalls in dealing with third party providers and knowing which questions to ask upfront about technical and non-technical pre-requisites. For instance, Surdu’s “ComeriCloud” is designed to experiment with automation and virtualization technologies that are fundamental to an external cloud provider’s capabilities.

Some of those lessons include living your architectural patterns and standard designs and maintaining control with your cloud providers. Externally hosted applications that aren’t consistent with standard architectural patterns can “come back in the long term to haunt us,” Surdu says. He also adds that contracts are an extremely important part of a cloud arrangement when it comes to performance and availability requirements.

What stage are you at in your cloud suitability pursuit? What lessons have you learned in dealing with third parties and going this route that you’d like to share and discuss?

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