Building a solid cloud strategy is a critical step in your journey. Here’s how and why to get started now.
It’s easy to get excited about a cloud migration and the benefits your organization will enjoy once you have completed it. So much so, many organizations set out on their cloud transformation journey without a roadmap to guide them to their destination.
Critical to your IT operations is the ability to maintain or decrease cost, prevent risk, reduce complexity and optimize your environments and infrastructure. There is nothing worse than having to back-track and waste resources simply because the first step to cloud adoption failed to take place at the start of your journey.
Developing a Cloud Strategy is Essential, Not Optional
The first step to take during cloud transformation is developing a cloud strategy aligned to your business objectives. A roadmap will ensure the right architecture is built plus highlight needed capabilities for your cloud migration efforts, helping you stay aligned with organizational strategy.
According to The Enterprise Strategy Group, “41% of IT decision makers have moved a workload back from the public cloud to be run on-premises” after failing to achieve the expected benefits from the cloud migration. This is a result of poor planning and understanding of what workloads are best suited to cloud platforms.
Avoid Planning Failures with a Cloud Strategy Assessment
By creating a cloud strategy and roadmap, you set effective time, cost, and resource management goals to reduce the impact on your business. Maximize your cloud benefits by taking a step back to better understand where you are and where you want to be. Ask yourself:
- What are we currently achieving?
- What do we want to achieve?
- Are stakeholders involved and aligned with our strategy?
- What are the costs associated with moving from current state to desired state?
- Do we have a deep understanding of our applications and the capabilities of each application to operate effectively in the cloud?
- Are we equipped with the proper staff to perform the tasks required by this transition to cloud or do we require qualified partners to help support?
With the answers to these questions, you will discover key considerations you need to craft your plan for cloud migration – but don’t stop there. It’s important to also pay careful attention to cloud transformation trends such as cloud-exclusive application features, mobility, and enabling technologies.
It’s Never Too Late To Develop a Cloud Roadmap
Cloud adoption challenges shouldn’t have to keep you up at night. You can mitigate risks associated with the lack of a cloud transformation strategy by using best practices and getting started with a proper plan. No matter where you’re at in your cloud journey, there’s never a better time than now to create a roadmap of how to move forward with your cloud transformation process.
Through a full range of cloud consulting services, Eliassen Group helps organizations around the world develop and implement cloud strategies that support their business objectives. A key element of our approach is our Cloud Adoption Framework: a multi-step, proven process to help companies achieve the goals of their cloud initiatives.
