To align with ITIL recommendations, enterprise IT services should be a customer-facing representation of the available technology services. An organization's IT services catalog should, in turn, provide all the information a customer should need to review, select, and acquire cloud solutions. Although both top-down approaches (from the business view) and bottom-up approaches (based on a technology and an available technology services view) have been used, industry best practices indicate that the bottom-up approach is far more efficient, because it is based on something tangible—the technology or technology services available to an organization.
A mapping of technology services to a cloud solution requires standards regarding both architecture and delivery. Without this standardization, a mapping across the IT external...