People who define new cloud platforms in enterprises often do only half the work. What do they miss? They consistently overlook these three areas:
Governance, both at the resource levels (such as storage and compute) and at the service level (such as APIs).
Governance is like having brakes on a car. You don't need it until you are well under way. The ability to manage thousands of APIs, for example -- both cloud-delivered and home-built -- becomes cumbersome after about 500. At that point, mistakes start being made, and the enterprise cloud architect needs to bring in an API governance/management technology. Don't wait that long.
Management. Once you're operating your applications and data in the cloud, operations are critical. This means performance management, SLA management, and logging -- really, the ability to manage the entire cloud deployment using a single interface.
Though public clouds are managed by unseen minions, you are responsible for managing your own cloud instances. Moreover, enterprise deployments are complex. You need to manage that complexity effectively.
Security. This issue is typically on the radar from the outset, but it's often improperly defined. Although you would think that security and the cloud go hand in hand, I consistently find huge missing pieces.
For example, identity and access management are often overlooked due to IT's focus on encryption and other tactical security technologies. Encryption should be systemic, of course. But it's even more important that you can manage complexities using identities, and mix and match which items are authorized to which other items, or to whom. This is hugely important if you're deploying more than only a few applications. Moreover, your risk of breach goes way way down if you deploy effective identity and access management.
Of course, there are other pieces to review and consider. Dozens of possibilities come to mind, from training to application management. However, if you focus on the three issues outlined in this post, you'll be off to a good start -- and will likely have a manageable and successful cloud deployment.