The cloud is frequently in the IT news. As a result, you may have been thinking about it for some time. You may have already done research and established how the cloud can save you money, cut back on IT management, and give your business the agility it needs.

When it comes to the concept of the cloud, you know what's in it for you. Now you're ready to move to the next stage. You want more detail about the way the cloud can improve specific aspects of your business. You need these details to:

Remove all possibility of risk
Confirm your confidence about the cloud
Convince colleagues of the cloud's worth
HP's one-stop shop

HP can answer all your enquiries. The company has developed a complete one-stop shop for a private cloud. It has the servers, switches and storage to give you a working solution with just one vendor. HP is the only company to offer this.

To help you adopt this solution and reap the benefits, HP offers a cloud assessment. You can use this to see how well prepared you are for the cloud. The assessment can focus your mind on the details you need to know about.

The assessment has three sections, each with multiple-choice answers:

· IT value
· Customer satisfaction
· Operational excellence

IT value

This part of the assessment has four questions. They relate to cutting IT costs, managing and controlling costs, assessing average costs, and the balance between capital and operational expenditure.

The questions don't require detailed financial data. They simply direct you to key areas of IT value.

You tick the answers most applicable to you. At one end of the scale, these confirm a systematic controlled use of IT. At the other, they raise queries manged cloud  how much value IT is really giving your business.

Customer satisfaction

The customer satisfaction section has three questions. They cover the measurement of mission-critical service availability, service performance, and SLAs.

The answers help show whether you meet or exceed your customer's expectations.

Operational excellence

The third section is about process excellence across your IT systems. The first two questions ask about the time it takes to deploy a change to a single line of code, and to procure a new business service. The final question asks for a percentage estimate of the use of your data centre.

Take the HP assessment

The assessment takes just a few minutes. When you're finished, HP sends you a customised report.

The HP cloud assessment helps prepare your business for the move from traditional IT. And when you adopt HP's service for your private cloud, you gain a flexible, cost-cutting IT solution.

Take the next step - take the HP Cloud Assessment.

Steve Denby is Sales Director at LETN Ltd. Based in Reading, Berkshire, UK, LETN design and implement cost efficient infrastructure solutions using Leading Edge Technology.