Strategy
Before embarking on your Cloud transformation journey you need to develop a strategy that answers fundamental questions such as why you are on the journey and what your vision is.
Your strategy will inform how you execute, architect, manage and prioritise your Cloud implementation. These answers will also help guide you when addressing naturally occurring conflicts.
The key steps which you need to execute in order to define your strategy are:
- Define and document your motivations: Meet with key stakeholders and executives to document the motivations behind the cloud initiative.
- Document business vision: Engage motivated stakeholders and executives to document specific business outcomes.
- Evaluate financial considerations: Build a business case to adopt the cloud.
- Understand technical considerations: Discover the technical flexibility, efficiencies, and capabilities that help you build a business case to adopt the cloud.
Motivations
Typically, an organisations will have a number of different motivations for performing a transformation, each of with varying priorities, time horizons and stakeholders.
You motivations need to be classified and agreed with stakeholders as they will drive your cloud adoption strategy.
| Critical business events | Migration | Innovation |
|---|---|---|
| Datacenter exit | Cost savings | Preparation for new technical capabilities |
| Merger, acquisition, or divestiture | Reduction in vendor or technical complexity | Building new technical capabilities |
| Reduction in capital expenses | Optimization of internal operations | Scaling to meet market demands |
| End of support for mission-critical technologies | Increase in business agility | Scaling to meet geographic demands |
| Response to regulatory compliance changes | Preparation for new technical capabilities | Improved customer experiences and engagements |
| New data sovereignty requirements | Scaling to meet market demands | Transformation of products or services |
| Reduction of disruptions and improvement of IT stability | Scaling to meet geographic demands | Market disruption with new products or services |
| Report and manage the environmental impact of your business | Integration of a complex IT portfolio | Democratization and/or self-service environments |
Vision
The most successful transformation journeys start with a business outcome or Vision in mind. Where your Motivations inform why you are conducting the program of work, your Vision will generally inform why you are implementing in a specific manner.
A number of outcomes are given here with typical ones being:
- Fiscal / Cost Reduction
- Agility / Time-to-market
- Performance / Reliability
Financial
To develop a Business Case you need to analyse your existing estate and have a Rough Order of Magnitude(ROM) determination as to where and in what format each workload will land. You will also need to include the cost of building the foundation and the execution of each migration.
There are a number of cloud optimisations that can be implemented to reduce your costs, some of which being:
- Right Sizing of workloads
- Reserved Instances
- Dev/Test Licensing for non-production workloads
- Powering off of workloads when not in use
- Deprecating IaaS - requiring additonal effort and tools to support - for PaaS - which requires less tools and support
Technical
In order to execute a successful transformation you will require a number of different types of resources engaged on your program. The following are a few examples of the types of help commonly required.
- Strategy: Support defining the business strategy, building a business case, and supporting technology strategy.
- Plan: Support with discovery of the portfolio, quantitative assessment of the digital estate, development of a cloud adoption plan, creation of a skilling plan.
- Ready: Support deploying a landing zone or full cloud environment capable of supporting the cloud adoption plan.
- Migrate: Assistance migrating workloads or building a migration factory to ensure sound migration processes.
- Innovate: Assistance developing new solutions or rebuilding/rearchitecting existing solutions to drive innovation.
- Govern: Support or ongoing managed services to provide governance and controls across the cloud environment.
- Manage: Support or ongoing managed services to operate the cloud platform and the workloads hosted in the cloud.