E018 Cloud Strategy is recorded under banner number ITEC 6210 and is worth 3 competency units. It asks you to research available cloud technologies against business needs, propose organizational cloud policies and recommend a broader cloud strategy. E018 and ITEC 6210 are one requirement. The graduate distinction from the technical cloud courses is that nothing here is about how a service works; everything is about whether the organization should use it and under what rules.
Strategy starts with a position, not a platform
A cloud strategy is a set of positions an organization takes so that individual decisions stop being argued from scratch. Is the default to build in a cloud unless there is a reason not to, or the reverse? Do we standardise on one provider for the operational simplicity, or accept multiple for resilience and negotiating position? What data may leave our own facilities and under what conditions? Do we prefer managed services for speed or portable ones for optionality? Answering those questions is the strategy; everything else is implementation.
Policy is the mechanism that makes a position operational. A strategy nobody wrote into rules is a preference that erodes on the first exception. Cloud policy usually needs to cover who may create resources, spending limits and approval thresholds, what data classification may live where, required security baselines, and how exceptions are requested and reviewed.
Financial management deserves genuine attention because it is where cloud strategies most visibly succeed or fail. Cloud spending is decentralised by design, grows continuously, and belongs to nobody unless someone is made accountable. A strategy that does not say who owns the bill, how spending is attributed to teams, and what triggers a review will be revisited within a year by whoever received an unexpected invoice.
Portability and provider risk are the strategic considerations that technical courses skip. Every managed service you adopt trades speed now for cost of change later, and concentration with a single provider trades operational simplicity for exposure to that provider's pricing, outages and roadmap. Both are legitimate trades; neither should be made accidentally.
The record shows Competent or Not Competent, and neither letter grades nor an ordinary grade point average are recorded, and 3 competency units is how the course's weight is expressed in a six month flat-rate term.
Turning aspects into a strategy and policy set
If your version of E018 uses a performance assessment, the aspects usually cover research, policy proposals and the strategy itself. WGU requires a score of 2 in each aspect for a task to pass and judges each aspect alone, so a well researched technology comparison will not carry an unaddressed policy aspect.
Budget before drafting. Take a rubric with six scored aspects and a target near 2,100 words. Reserve 150 words for the organization and its current position, and 110 for the close, leaving 1,840 across six aspects, or roughly 306 each. Weight by demand: two aspects requiring the strategy recommendation and its justification take 420 each, which is 840; the four remaining aspects, covering research, policy content, governance and financial management, take 250 each, which is 1,000. Together that is 1,840.
Write policy as enforceable statements rather than as guidance. "Teams should consider cost" is not a policy. "Any resource without an owner tag is subject to deletion after fourteen days, with notice to the account owner" is one, because someone could implement and enforce it.
Reserve budget for the exception process. Every policy meets a case it did not anticipate, and a strategy that has no route for a justified exception either gets ignored or blocks legitimate work. Naming who approves exceptions and how they are reviewed is a small section with outsized credibility.
Shape for a cloud strategy and policy proposal
E018 deliverables usually set organizational direction. These proportions fit that document.
| Section | Content | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Business context | What the organization does, its direction, and what technology has to enable over the period. | 12 percent |
| Technology research | Options assessed against stated business needs rather than against each other in the abstract. | 19 percent |
| Strategic positions | The explicit positions taken on default placement, provider concentration, data and portability. | 21 percent |
| Policy set | Enforceable statements on provisioning, spending, data classification, security baseline and exceptions. | 19 percent |
| Financial management | Who owns the bill, how cost is attributed, what triggers review and how waste is found. | 14 percent |
| Governance | Who decides, who approves exceptions, and how the strategy itself is revisited. | 10 percent |
| Close | Provider risk position and the first decision the new strategy should settle. | 5 percent |
Sourcing a strategy document
Capability and pricing structure claims belong to provider documentation, dated, since both change frequently enough that an undated claim is unverifiable. Adoption practice and governance patterns belong to published frameworks and cloud governance guidance. Claims about what organizations experience belong to research or industry survey data with a year and a population.
Research quality is itself an assessed element in this course, so show your method. Saying which options you considered, on what criteria, and why others were excluded turns a comparison into research rather than a summary of three product pages.
Cost projections need visible assumptions. A three year cost comparison is only meaningful if the growth rate, the workload profile and the staffing on each side are stated, and stating them lets a reader argue with the conclusion, which is what makes it credible rather than decorative.
Where regulation constrains data placement, cite the regulation rather than a general statement about compliance. Data residency and sector-specific rules frequently rule out otherwise attractive options, and identifying that early is one of the more valuable things a strategy document does.
Apply whichever citation style the task specifies and attach every source to the sentence that depends on it.
Competent strategy and returned work
Competent submissions take explicit positions, write policy that could be enforced, assign ownership of cost, treat provider concentration and portability as deliberate trades, and provide an exception route.
Returns follow four shapes. The document compares providers at length and never states a position the organization would adopt. Policy is written as advice, so nothing is enforceable. Financial management is absent, which in a cloud strategy is the most predictable gap. Or the strategy assumes a single provider without ever discussing what that concentration costs.
Skills strategy is the section most often missing and it is genuinely strategic. A cloud strategy changes what the technology function needs to be good at: less hardware, more automation, more cost analysis, more identity engineering. Saying how the organization gets those skills, whether by hiring, retraining or partnering, and how long each route takes, is what distinguishes a strategy someone could execute from a set of positions with no path to them.
Timeframe deserves an explicit statement too. A cloud strategy written without a horizon reads as permanent, and nothing in this field is. Saying that these positions are intended to hold for a stated period, with a named review point and the conditions that would prompt an earlier revisit, protects the document from being quoted years later against circumstances it never anticipated.
A useful test: hand your policy set to someone and ask whether they could tell, for a specific proposed system, whether it complies. If they cannot answer without asking you, the policy is guidance rather than policy, and rewriting it as testable statements is the fix.
A returned performance assessment costs nothing in grade terms to rework, so completeness beats polish when you are deciding whether to submit, since an early submission leaves room for a revision cycle. If your section also carries an objective assessment, WGU objective assessments are proctored and our boundary is fixed: preparation only, with governance drills, policy writing practice and a candid read on your preassessment result. Nobody here sits an assessment, take no part once one begins, and your portal login is never something we touch.
Comparison written, position missing?
Send the E018 rubric and scenario. We turn research into explicit positions and enforceable policy, with word targets for every aspect.
Eight mistakes that cost time in E018
- Comparing without deciding. A strategy takes positions. A comparison that ends without one has not done the work.
- Policy written as advice. If compliance cannot be determined, it is guidance rather than policy.
- No cost ownership. Cloud spending grows and belongs to nobody until someone is made accountable for it.
- Provider concentration by default. Standardising is a legitimate choice. Making it without naming the exposure is not.
- Ignoring portability cost. Managed services buy speed and charge for it at exit. Say which ones you accepted that for.
- No exception route. A policy with no exception process is either ignored or blocks legitimate work.
- Undated provider claims. Capability and pricing change continually. Date every reference.
- Projections with hidden assumptions. State growth, workload and staffing or the comparison cannot be argued with.
Three questions students ask about E018
How technical does a cloud strategy need to be?
Should I recommend a single provider or several?
How does this differ from D282 Cloud Foundations?
Where E018 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 1 current WGU program. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.