The "journey to the cloud" is a great tagline for helping customers go from a pure "private cloud" environment to a public or hybrid cloud solution.

1. One of the first steps that most customers today are already at, is to virtualize the majority (if not all) of your workloads. Because of how common it is to find this already in place, I won't go into detail here.

2. The second step once the systems are virtualized is to quantify the cost of the virtual machines and hardware powering them to establish a baseline and help determine the desired pricing to beat for a public cloud provider.

3. Now here's where the nerd fun begins. At this step, number three if you're following along, an important decision must be made to determine how you will deliver access to your data/applications to end users. This can be done through a simple VPN connection, in which the user accesses the data over an encrypted tunnel (though this is a really limited model). It can be done through a web portal or similar Content Management System-- something along the lines of SharePoint can suffice for basic office documents and the like. But where the real power/flexibility comes in is when you start delivering either the application itself, or a desktop that contains the desired application, to the user through a portal or client application. The biggest players here are Citrix, who can deliver the desktop and/or the application and VMware, who can deliver the desktop (worth pointing out that VMware requires ESXi as the hypervisor for this, Citrix supports ESXi, XenServer, and Hyper-V).

These solutions allow users to get to their data / applications securely and remotely (if allowed by your company) without issue, and offer a near native experience for most use cases. And depending on which solution you go with, you can provide your users with a desktop or application on many different devices-- including Macs, iPads, iPhones, Android phones, Blackberry phones, Android tablets, ChromeBooks, etc.

4. So the users in the company can now access their applications and do their work remotely with limited reduction in efficiency or capability. What's next? Well at this point, you essentially have a "private cloud" and lots of capabilities. This step is optional, but when followed can provide the best level of education and lead to easier / better decisions when looking outside the company for cloud resources.

This step is all about cost reporting and monitoring. VMware offers their product, vCenter Chargeback, but any similar product will suffice here. The goal is to accurately calculate the cost for your environment to provide compute resources on your private cloud. When you have this information you can easily see what individual machines cost, how much an entire department costs if your company allows for departmental chargeback, and even help you forecast out what you'll need to spend to grow your environment. But more importantly, this helps you line up cost for YOUR resources so you can directly compare them against the cost of cloud resources.

5. Using your calculated pric