Here is a seven-step plan to help get you there.

1. Baseline your current cost and quality of service. Before you can justify any on-premise cloud initiative you'll need to accurately determine your existing IT costs and consumption metrics. Maybe you have a hunch you're not fully utilizing infrastructure? Could you be over- (or under-) investing in certain areas? By benchmarking versus third-party cloud vendors and outsourcing options you'll establish a baseline and uncover where to focus initial efforts. In addition, analytics geared toward "what-ifs" and scenario planning can help tease out additional concerns regarding , internal costs and investments, technology needs, etc. Ultimately, you must be able to cost out internal IT products, identify areas where cloud could potentially help and then eventually, measure the ROI of the transition to ensure projected cost savings become reality.

2. Define on-premise cloud services with pricing and SLAs. An on-premise cloud allows IT organizations to leverage existing investments in hardware, construct and enable end-users within the business to self-provision. Start by identifying those and IT services ready to move into the on-premise cloud. Consider:

• Web services. Are your current Web services constrained by scalability, unpredictable workloads, high availability requirements, etc.?

• Dev/Test or Dev/Ops. Do your development and test teams have trouble managing frequent setup and teardown of resources? Are they unable to standardize configurations for globally distributed teams, or do they have difficulty responding to variable infrastructure demands?