Moving business applications to the public cloud is a board-sponsored decision. What determines the risk is whether those workloads land in a secure, governed environment or an improvised one.
The foundation: a landing zone
A cloud landing zone is the prepared foundation of an enterprise cloud platform. It is a secure, resilient, well-governed environment, set up ahead of migration and tailored to the business, so that workloads can be built and moved with the future of the business in mind. It should be in place before the workloads arrive.
The team that runs it
A landing zone needs a function to operate it. Depending on the organisation, this goes by names such as Cloud Platform Team or Cloud Centre of Excellence. It promotes good cloud practice across the business, provides technical assurance, looks after cloud security posture, manages cost, and builds solutions that can be reused across the organisation.
A complete cloud operating model brings technology, people, and processes together to turn the intent of adopting cloud into real capability.
The operating model that holds it together
Technology, people, and processes have to arrive together. The landing zone is the technology, the platform team is the people, and defined processes connect them, so everyone knows what to do, why, how, and when. Together they form the cloud target operating model, which turns the strategic intent of adopting the public cloud into operating capability. The most successful cloud programmes give attention to all three.
What the board should ask
Whether cloud adoption is landing in a governed environment with a named owner and an operating model behind it, or whether workloads are going live ahead of the foundation. The first is a managed programme. The second is risk the board has not yet seen.