Moving to the cloud can have significant benefits for your business. However, there is quite a bit of preparation you need to do first, before you greenlight any potential cloud-based initiative.
Here are four essential considerations you should address before making the commitment to move towards any given cloud service or technology.
Define Business Drivers and Goals
Before embarking on any cloud project, there is an essential first question to ask youself: What are you trying to achieve by moving to the cloud? Common goals include saving money, reducing the impact and cost of your IT footprint, and making your business more agile. You need to decide which of these goals are important to you; and if more than one apply, make sure you prioritize them.
Too often, organizations move to the cloud simply because they can, rather than because they’ve thought through what they’ll get out of it.
Establish Key Stakeholder Buy-In and Alignment
Once you have a clear understanding of why you want to move to the cloud, you need to get buy-in. The key stakeholders involved in your move to the cloud may have different goals and expectations. For example, since a CFO’s primary concern are financial matters, they are probably most interested in the cost savings cloud adoption may bring. However, it is important they know that cost savings are unlikely out of the gate (or even impossible if costs are not actively managed).
On the other hand, a business stakeholder might be more interested in rolling out new services faster than ever before. These stakeholders need to know that, while new cloud services should be faster to develop, it takes planning and coordination to make sure new apps conform to existing corporate governance frameworks (including security and compliance requirements).
Because stakeholder expectations often differ, it is important to develop a strategy to reconcile the differences and align them in pursuit of common goals. Stakeholders will also need to rank their priorities so you can design your journey to the cloud in a way that meets the most important priorities first.
Let Goals (Not Trends) Dictate Actions and Decisions
What you do next will depend on your ultimate goals, and there are several paths you could take. For example, if your aim is to improve business agility and reduce development costs, you may want to implement a DevOps model, which involves a confluence between your developers and existing IT operations.
This model empowers businesses to create their business services, but keeps them aligned with corporate IT standards. It is important for you clearly define security and development guidelines for your developers and IT operations team. Rather than letting developers create new services based on the latest trends, define your business goals and use them to dictate your actions and decisions.
Create a Governance Plan
The purpose of a governance plan is to ensure your cloud solution doesn’t violate core business principles and regulations. The plan should contain the guiding principles you use to move forward with your cloud adoption.
In my experience, a cloud governance plan is essential. In fact, I can relate an interesting story from a few years ago. During a cloud transition (before my time at Portal Solutions) my IT team had started to develop services for our customers using Amazon Web Services because they didn’t want to wait for our internal IT staff to get the infrastructure they needed up and running. It was simply taking too long to go that route so they started using AWS. This opened up a lot of potentially insecure data connections, putting the whole organization at risk. This situation demonstrated we needed a governance plan to guide the developers’ activities in the cloud.
While we didn’t have a name for it yet, we were early adopters of the Dev/Ops approach as we included IT Ops in our subsequent development projects. This cooperation allowed us to avoid some potentially serious security risks as we developed and rolled out new solutions for our customers.
Final Thought: Think and Plan Before You Act
Successfully moving to the cloud isn’t about using the most advanced technology. Achieving your business goals depends on taking the appropriate steps to get the most from the technological solution you choose to use. Solid planning will allow you to achieve the goals that drove you to the cloud in the first place and unlock the promise these technologies offer.
