Moving to the cloud is a large shift for any business and not just the IT team. This is compounded by many organisations being at different levels of cloud adoption maturity. In order to optimise the adoption process, an organisation must recognise its maturity level. This will show a much clearer picture of the challenges to be faced and how best to face them. From the top, the maturity levels and their respective challenges are as follows.
Stage One; Project
Here an organisation has limited knowledge of cloud services and zero adoption strategy. Executives are often resistant to new expenditures. So to overcome their scepticism and set the ball rolling, potential costs and benefits need assessing. An organisation will need clear, centralised ownership of the cloud migration project before moving to the next stage.
Stage Two; Foundation
In this stage, once contractual agreements are in place, a detailed plan is necessary for the migration. Details such as a business case, approach to migration, time frame and required resources will need outlining. IT leaders must present a transformation plan addressing every aspect of organisational change, such as service delivery, governance and operations. Other requirements needed for proceeding are a highly scalable security and compliance architecture. As well as a standardisation of technical processes and procedures.
Stage Three; Migration
Here’s where an organisation implements the outlined processes, creating efficient migration of application workloads. Here is also where a portfolio rationalisation occurs. This determines which specific applications to migrate, replace, or remove. The main challenges in this stage are delays, usually at the hand of technical failures and inefficient processes. Planning and carrying out the migrations in repeatable bursts is a smart approach. This stage will be complete once the benefits of migration are visible. Benefits such as cost savings and increased agility.
Stage Four; Optimisation
Unlike previous stages, this stage is infinite. The aim here is to constantly monitor and optimise the new cloud environment. There are ongoing challenges to be addressed during this phase. Optimising costs being the main one. And monitoring third party cloud providers for their new services being another. It’s important to keep abreast of these services and constantly evaluate them for their optimisation potential.
Regardless of where an organisation is during the adoption process, the pointers above will reduce any risk and uncertainty. When used optimally, the model can offer direction that will save an organisation thousands. Thousands saved by recognising common, costly challenges and allowing you to deal with them early.