Why We Created the Cloud Enablement Calculator

Last updated on May 5th, 2023 at 3:13pm

IDC recently projected that 750 million cloud-native applications will be created globally by 2025.

That’s a ton of development in the cloud.

How many of these applications will arise out of optimized cloud operations and how many will struggle to cross the finish line due to manual or outdated operations?

If your organization is cloud enabled, we think you’ll have a much easier road to travel as you create these cloud applications.

Defining Cloud Enabled

When you bring together and automate the application of policies and controls defined in your cloud governance approach AND the activities necessary for cloud management – across access management, cost control and optimization, and compliance – that’s cloud enablement.

Interestingly, the Pluralsight/A Cloud Guru Q3 2022 State of Cloud report references being cloud enabled as the highest level of cloud maturity. Here’s how their survey respondents self-assessed their cloud maturity:

They define cloud enabled as when organizations “use strategic cloud governance and development to enable optimal business continuity and rapid scalability of security and other core business capabilities".

Are You Cloud Enabled?

How do you evaluate your progress on the road to cloud enablement?

While you may have a rough idea or a gut feeling, it’s important to find an objective measurement. Measuring your progress on the path to being fully cloud enabled is important for two key reasons:

• First, it helps you align your cloud governance and management practices with industry best practices to give you confidence that you're on the right track.
• Second, it provides you with a baseline of your cloud performance, allowing you to identify areas where you're doing well and areas that need improvement.

When you look across your cloud estate, you need to know how you’re doing from the time you spin up and provision a cloud account to the time you deprovision that account. Ideally, you want to assess your cloud maturity across the full cloud lifecycle and across the areas of account management, financial management and cost optimization, and compliance.

Evaluating Your Cloud Maturity with the Cloud Enablement Calculator

Software companies often invest a lot of time helping prospective customers determine the potential ROI of purchasing their product. While ROI calculators have their place, we identified an opportunity to back up a bit in the process and examine the capabilities that signal cloud enablement. Before you determine the value of introducing Kion, we thought it would be helpful to provide a way to self-assess how you're doing on the path to cloud enablement. The Cloud Enablement Calculator Survey is the result.

This survey helps you assess your cloud governance and management practices by measuring your performance across several areas in the cloud:

• Provisioning
• Budgeting
• Cost Management
• Compliance
• Visibility
• Identity

We crafted our survey questions based on best practices from cloud service providers, our cloud development experience, and what we’ve seen and heard from customers.

The survey will take approximately 10 minutes to complete. After taking the survey, you get a score from 0 to 100. If you want more detail behind each question and recommendations, you can elect to receive a custom report based on your answers.

Inside Your Custom Cloud Enablement Report

If you provide your email at the conclusion of the survey, you’ll get a custom cloud enablement report. (Our promise: We won’t bombard your inbox with a gazillion emails, and we always include an unsubscribe link.)

Your custom report will contain:

• Your calculated score
• How you responded to each survey question
• An explanation of why the capability described in the survey question is key to being fully cloud enabled and recommendations to improve your score
• A bit about how Kion can help you grow your capabilities

Some of the recommendations from the survey can help you save time and money by:

• Streamlining your cloud governance and management processes
• Identifying cost savings through automation and optimizations.

Here’s an excerpt from a sample report.

3 Ways to Use the Calculator

No matter where you are in your cloud journey, there’s a need to measure your performance:

• You’re just getting started or are early in your adoption: Take the survey to get started on the right foot.
• To audit your progress: You’re well on your way and are looking to see how you stack up against industry best practices.
• To benchmark before and after: You’re getting ready to make significant changes to your cloud operations and/or introduce new technology. Take the survey before making major changes and then retake the survey after your changes are in place.

We hope to share the anonymized data in the future to provide a snapshot of cloud enablement across organizations. Yet another reason to share your input – access to survey data to see how you compare!

Get Your Score