The business advantages of cloud computing are well established, especially for businesses that have a geographically dispersed workforce, such as remote workers and employees working in the field.
A cloud system is designed to be available anywhere, on any device, helping to improve your productivity and agility. It’s also a great way to reduce costs by streamlining your IT organization and information governance strategy.
But these benefits don’t show up automatically or as quickly as one may expect. If you’re moving to a cloud-based productivity suite like Office 365, that change needs to take place in the context of a comprehensive cloud strategy if you want to maximize your organization’s cost savings and productivity gains.
Most businesses don’t have a solid cloud strategy in place. When adopting the cloud, the change tends to be reactive rather than strategic, and viewed as a way to solve some technical challenge instead of a decision that focuses on achieving larger business outcomes.
Knowing what you want from the cloud and what you expect to achieve helps to accelerate the return on your technology investment. Here are five important steps to take:
- Set stakeholder expectations: This is the first step in establishing what you are trying to achieve by moving to the cloud, whether that’s improving communication, collaboration, productivity or mobile access.
- Define your drivers and goals: As you identify your business goals, assign specific drivers, such as cost savings or agility measures.
- Identify and quantify the impact of a cloud strategy: Assess how moving to the cloud is likely to affect your users and the IT organization. What impact will moving to a cloud environment have on your IT policy, IT personnel, governance and budget?Managing IT in the cloud requires a different skillset than on-premises management, so don’t just assume that your IT administrator is going to be able to make this switch on his or her own. What does your team need to support users once you switch to the cloud?
- Understand the costs: While the cloud offers tremendous cost savings benefits down the road, many organizations fail to recognize the short-term costs.In general, the cloud transfers one-time capital expenses for IT (such as purchasing hardware and software) into an ongoing operational expense. Even so, this transition is going to increase costs in the short term because of the changes involved.
- Establish the return on investment: When organizations try to jump right in with a cloud solution, they tend to have flawed expectations for ROI because they lack a thorough understanding of the costs and benefits for their specific organization. By completing the four previous steps in creating your cloud strategy, you’re able to set a realistic timeline for realizing value and expectations for your return on investment.
Once you’ve established your larger cloud strategy, you’re ready to choose the best tools for achieving those business goals in the cloud. You’re always going to need a set of tools, such as Office 365 for communication and collaboration, Microsoft Azure for cloud infrastructure as well as cloud-based line-of-business applications, such as ERP or CRM systems. In addition, those cloud systems will need to be connected and somehow integrated to provide a seamless user experience.
As you continue from there to implementation and migration, your cloud strategy continues to inform your decisions and planning for the transition, including change management, testing, contingency planning and a cut-off date. With the right transition plan, your end users shouldn’t even notice when you cut over from your on-premises solutions to the cloud.
In the end, strategy is key to a successful transition to the cloud, and that means having a clear understanding of what issues you’re trying to address and how you’re going to get there as an organization. Understanding and managing these changes helps you reduce the costs of this transition and improves the business value of your cloud investments.
Learn more about using a cloud strategy to achieve your business goals by watching our on-demand webinar, Key Business Considerations When Moving Your Enterprise To The Microsoft Cloud.
