Open Data Center Alliance, an industry association of enterprise IT decision makers from some of the world's biggest companies, has updated its Cloud Maturity Model – a visualization of development of enterprise cloud over time.

The new model includes five levels of cloud maturity and maturity models for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Information-as-a-Service (Info-aaS). The paper reviews both the business and technology issues associated with each level of cloud maturity and has been developed to serve as a roadmap enterprises can use to plan cloud adoption strategies and implementations based on ODCA usage models and requirements.

The alliance's model starts with no cloud adoption and progresses through five maturity levels that eventually lead to defining an enterprise's capabilities and requirements for deploying full-scale federated cloud services that are open, secure and interoperable.

Ryan Skipp, who runs portfolio and solution development at DTAG/T-Systems and chairs the ODCA Manageability and Services work group, said the model was an important resource for companies just beginning on their path to cloud, as well as for those already deploying cloud services and solutions.

“The CMM (Cloud Maturity Model) provides information that can be used immediately to analyze enterprise cloud readiness and as a business and technology road map for continuously adding new services as enterprise cloud requirements evolve,” Skipp said.

The model represents an enterprise's ability to sustainably adopt cloud services within defined governance and control parameters and includes assessment of cloud architecture, infrastructure, information and management. Organizations can use it to identify where they currently are on the cloud maturity model and to determine where they want to be in the future, based on each enterprise's unique business goals and criteria.