Preparing for the Future: Developing a Long-Term Cloud Migration Plan

Preparing for the Future: Developing a Long-Term Cloud Migration Plan

So, you’ve decided to migrate to the cloud, but you’re not sure what you should do to ensure you achieve long-term success? While it is essential to understand how you will use the cloud today, it is vital that your cloud adoption strategy and cloud migration planning considers the future of your enterprise or business venture and anticipates the growth you hope to achieve.

Successful cloud migration hinges on a well-researched, clearly defined, and systematic strategy. This article will help you ensure that your cloud migration plan is scalable and future-proof.

Define Goals & Success

To know that your transition to the cloud has been a success, you must first define what success looks like to your business. Cloud migration planning offers many benefits compared to alternative infrastructure, including efficiency, cost reduction, data security, and scalability. Firms within the manufacturing industry may migrate to the cloud to improve efficiency, whereas the healthcare industry may utilise the improved safety of the cloud.

Ask yourself the following questions to make sure that you have accurately captured your goals:

• What were you hoping to achieve in moving to the cloud?
• Which KPIs will you need to track to know if you’ve reached your goals?
• What does a successful transition to the cloud look like to you?

Develop a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE)

The Cloud Center of excellence comprises a multi-disciplined team guiding other employees within the establishment through the journey of cloud migration and operation. This team will set the foundations and standards for a process that everyone will repeat and follow.

The following is a list of some types of CCoEs you may want to consider for your cloud adoption strategy:

• Functional CCoE
• Prescriptive CCoE
• Advisory CCoE

Eliminate Cloud Sprawl

Cloud sprawl is an organisation’s ungovernable and snowballing use of the cloud’s services and providers. Cloud sprawl can often occur when the business does not have visibility and control over its resources in cloud computing. Your cloud adoption strategy and cloud migration planning must focus on solid governance to minimise the chances of cloud sprawl.

There are five critical disciplines of cloud governance:

• Cost management
• Deployment acceleration
• Security baseline
• Identity baseline
• Resource consistency

Team

Lastly, the team structure can be a big challenge to establish – organisations should carefully select the team if they want to build a future-proof cloud migration planning and adoption strategy. You may need to re-establish your current technology team or outsource to a team that specialises in cloud adoption. You will need to employ cloud technology partners who work to understand your business as this is critical to long-term success.

Steps to take when building your cloud adoption team:

Step 1:

• Decide what type of team you will need.
• Select the methodology you will use to adopt, e.g. migrate or innovate.
• Decide which tools you will need in the beginning.
• Align responsibilities across teams by developing a cross-team matrix that identifies responsible, accountable, consulted and informed parties.

Step 2:

• Align your team with supporting teams.
• Review guidance with groups to understand any limitations.

Step 3:

• Expand your skills.
• Address more complex adoption scenarios.

Step 4:

• Build a cloud adoption factory.
• Improve the delivery process to create a highly optimised adoption factory.

Build a Future Proof Cloud Adoption Strategy

In 2019 Unisys reported that 77% of respondents who made cloud adoption a part of their core strategies found cloud migration to improve technology architecture significantly. To conclude, a cloud adoption strategy that aligns with the future of your enterprise is going to increase your chances of success. At Incepteo, we’ve worked with clients on cloud migration projects that incorporate long-term cloud migration strategies and consulting support to prepare for the future.