Your complete guide to setting up your IBM Cloud account and resources.

A new checklist is now available in the IBM Cloud Docs for Getting started on IBM Cloud. This checklist outlines the tasks for you to complete that will accelerate your journey to cloud and guide you through your account setup and organization of resources.

With links to documentation and best practices that you can follow along the way, this is a one-stop shop to help you prepare to onboard your workloads to IBM Cloud.

Goals for this checklist

• Get up and running quickly on IBM Cloud
• Teach you how to be successful at the following tasks: 
  • Set up your account
  • Secure your cloud resources
  • Track costs and billing
  • Set up cloud connectivity 
  • Enable logging and monitoring
  • Find additional self-help resources

What’s included in the checklist?

The self-guided set up checklist is organized into eight sections: 

1. Explore the platform: Get an overview of IBM Cloud and learn about the options available to manage your resources. If you have little-to-no experience with IBM Cloud, this section is for you.
2. Set up accounts and enterprises: Learn about the differences between a stand-alone account and an enterprise. You can also learn how to decide on federating with your Identity Provider. This section is for administrators responsible for creating and configuring an account structure in IBM Cloud.
3. Secure your account and resources: After you set up your IBM Cloud account, you’re ready to start planning how you want to organize resources and assign access to identities in your account. These best practices provide you with the basic building blocks to enable successful and secure app development in IBM Cloud. This section walks you through setting up multifactor authentication (MFA) for your account and members. It also discusses configuring activity tracking and your data encryption options. It then guides you through setting up the services that best fit your needs. 
4. Manage billing and usage: Learn about the steps that you can take to manage and track billing and usage in your account. 
5. Connect your network to IBM Cloud: The need to create a private connection between a remote network environment and servers on the IBM Cloud private network is a common requirement. Review your options for connecting from your on-premises environments to IBM Cloud and how to create the related services.
6. Enable logging and monitoring: Set up logging and monitoring to services running in your cloud account or forward to your security information and event management (SIEM).
7. Streamline access management with identities, groups, and policies: Your IBM Cloud account includes many interacting components and systems for resource, user and access management. This section walks you through creating access groups, resource groups and assigning access to resources.
8. Get support and other resources: If you experience problems with IBM Cloud, you have several options to get help determining the cause of the problem and finding a solution. In this section, you learn about available support options and supplementary resources.

Get started working through your checklist to get your account set up on IBM Cloud by following our best practices in the documentation.

Questions and feedback 

We encourage you to provide your feedback as you follow the tasks from this checklist by opening a doc issue or submitting an edit to the topic by using a pull request. You can find the options for opening an issue or submitting a pull request at the end of the page.