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.

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. 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.

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).

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. Now if a hurricane comes and displaces your users, they can remotely log in from wherever they'v