Cloud First to Cloud Smart: A Strategic Shift

A customised cloud smart strategy can match an organisation’s goals and circumstances to its ability to execute with the cloud.

• Gaps between cloud expectation and execution abilities: Organisations often develop unrealistic expectations from the cloud that get compounded due to the lack of technical, financial, or strategic skills required to implement them.
• Incongruency due to siloed business processes: The cloud is agile and dynamic by nature. Legacy organisational properties like operational silos, rigid IT governance and outdated foundational practices are often incompatible with the cloud.
• Speed over planning: A cloud first approach is speed centric. The mad rush to incorporate the cloud and its elements across each stratum of operations leaves limited time to adopt other approaches.
• Getting the right cloud services with the right workload: Cloud offerings can be diverse, extensive and complex. The varied and complicated nature of cloud service provider offerings exacerbates the confusion in matching the right cloud services with the right workload.
• Lack of specialized IT skills: Other than investment, planning and a cultural shift, a cloud transformation, also requires a specialized IT skillset that organisations often lack.

A cloud smart approach entails determining whether an organisation has the right mix of private and public cloud, edge, and on-prem infrastructure to meet its various unique workloads, as well as all its compliance and regulatory obligations.

• Identify and set realistic goals: The priority toward driving a cloud smart approach is to set realistic goals and expectations for cloud initiatives.
• The right fitment for the migration-mix: Identify the right cloud environments to determine which applications to keep on-premises and which to migrate to the cloud (private/public).
• A performance measurement cycle: Identify all the benchmarks and then focus on improving them as you progress along with a cloud smart strategy.
• The right investment in services and orchestration tools: Invest in tools and services that help in reducing the complexity of your cloud journey.
• Mitigation of the risks and compliance violations: Ungoverned cloud adoption and poor foundational practices can put organizations at risk of security breaches, data loss, compliance issues and budget overruns. They must be contained and mitigated accordingly.
• Workplace culture realignment: Use your current resources to their maximum value including reskilling and retraining staff. Also, enhance security postures and use best practices to inherit cultural reforms.
• A cloud exit strategy: Create a clear cloud exit strategy during the initial cloud design and planning phases considering aspects such as stakeholder management, application, legal and data governance, etc.

By taking on the benefits of all the different cloud environments and using that mix to offset the potential weaknesses of each, organisations can create a unified, automated and scalable environment perfect to their needs.

• Formulating a well-defined strategy that identifies obstacles, ensures minimal disruption, and sets realistic goals and expectations.
• Improving performance and cost-saving through a well-crafted migration strategy.
• Championing workload migrations in sync with organisational preferences, its technological, security and regulatory environments.
• Enabling organisations to take advantage of cloud economics by protecting current investments, optimising infrastructure resources, and forecasting the budget efficiently along with cost visibility.