There are numerous benefits to migrating your company to the cloud, from added security, nearly unlimited storage, access from anywhere, ease of use, and much more.

While migrating to the cloud is a relatively simple decision for many organizations, it’s not necessarily a simple task. There are a lot of components and considerations, which is why creating an in-depth, specific cloud adoption strategy is so important.

How detailed your cloud adoption strategy needs to be depends on what IT and organizational services you want to migrate to the cloud, as well as the size and complexity of your organization. Generally speaking, the larger your organization is and the more complex the services are, the more important a comprehensive, sequential cloud adoption strategy is.

Key Considerations When Choosing a Cloud Adoption Strategy

Before you dive headfirst into a cloud adoption strategy, there are some things to consider. These should all be key components of your overall strategy, including:

• Strategy alignment: Like any aspect of your business, it’s important that your cloud adoption strategy aligns with your overall business objective and strategies. In doing so, you’ll be ensuring the cloud migration, like other aspects of your business, provides you with a strategic advantage.
• Risk assessment and mitigation: There are inherent risks of migrating to the cloud,such as the possibility of data being lost or corrupted, associated downtime, as well as onboarding for personnel. That’s why it’s important to assess the specific risks cloud adoption presents to your organization and then come up with mitigation plans for each.
• Cost reduction: How much money is cloud migration going to save you in the long run? There is an upfront cost to cloud migration, but over time, many organizations find it saves them significant money compared to systems run on local networks that can be wisely reallocated elsewhere. What does that look like for your company?
• Cloud routes: There are many routes you can take to cloud migration and different providers. Are you migrating all of your data and systems, or part of it? Are you going to a public, private or hybrid cloud? All of the pros and cons of each should be weighed.
• Shared responsibility: With cloud migration being such a large project, it’s important that all involved parties know what their responsibilities are. In addition, it’s essential that responsibilities are shared among not just members of the IT team but of all teams who are going to be affected.

Choosing the Right Cloud Adoption Strategy

As mentioned, there are many different ways to migrate to the cloud. What route you choose is a decision that should be based on the pros and cons of each, and how they apply to your organization.

Cloud First Adoption

In cloud-first adoption, the organization will evaluate all cloud options first, before considering any alternatives such as on-premises solutions.

Many organizations and governments across the world have made it a policy to select cloud-first adoption. A major benefit to do so is that development can be easily done in a collaborative form in a known space—by anyone and from anywhere they are located.

One of the downsides is that the information and development won’t “live” on servers and computers that you own.

Cloud Only Adoption

Cloud only adoption takes the above one step further: It requires that all business solutions be developed on the cloud. It’s not an option, but rather a mandate for every IT need your organization has.

The cloud-only adoption strategy can provide the strength of forcing your organization to jump fully on board with the cloud, which in turn familiarizes your team with not only developing and deploying to the cloud, but also using platforms and software that is based in the cloud.

Again, a downside is the fact that nothing will live on your own computers and servers. If the cloud service experiences downtime, for instance, it will be out of your control.

Cloud Native Adoption

Cloud native adoption takes advantage of some of the biggest advantages that the cloud provides, including reliability, scalability and flexibility. The goal with native adoption is to build and run applications on the cloud to reduce costs, achieve scalability and mitigate risk.

This type of approach enables your business to make changes to applications frequently and fast, if need be, giving you significant competitive advantages.

Hybrid Cloud Adoption

Large organizations may decide to take a hybrid cloud adoption approach if they have significant data centers located on-premises.

In many cases, this infrastructure isn’t easily transferred to a full cloud platform, simply because it is so large, or because it has many parts that need to be integrated in a complex way.

There are also concerns in this situation with how employees will be upskilled and trained to work in a new environment. If your business has a large segment of long-tenured employees who are familiar with your legacy systems, having to retrain and upskill all of them on an entirely new system could provide a major challenge unto itself.

As such, the hybrid approach allows organizations to determine which specific-use cases would make the best fit for the public cloud now, with future plans potentially in place for other use cases.

Multi-Cloud Adoption

The multi-cloud approach utilizes many different cloud platforms, which enables organizations to take advantage of the best technology that each individual cloud platform offers.

There can be some associated operational issues with multi-cloud adoption, but it’s enjoyed widespread adoption in recent years due to its many benefits.

Some of the drawbacks to multi-cloud adoption is that it is often harder to keep secure. Different cloud providers have different approaches to security, which makes it more complicated for organizations to ensure their data is protected. With multiple clouds, it’s also more difficult to have a clear picture of the overall IT infrastructure — at least compared to single-cloud environments.

That being said, the major benefits of multi-cloud adoption include being able to leverage the advantages of each individual cloud while also mitigating potential risks associated with service disruptions, and also distributing workloads strategically.

Cloud Adoption Strategy Tips

If you’re preparing a cloud adoption strategy, there are some tips to follow that will make the entire process smoother.

• Deliver Custom Code Continuously: Cloud adoption should enable the organization to continually deliver custom code to their applications. This is particularly important with DevOps, which demands that the infrastructure be available to change and deploy instantly.
• Prioritize Your Migration: When you’re developing your strategy, it’s important to create a migration priority list. Those services and applications that have a usage that is highly variable should be prioritized over others to provide you the best savings long term, as well as the best flexibility near term.
• Manage Your Strategy: For your cloud migration strategy to be successful, you will need to have a definitive plan in place for how it’s going to be executed and how it’s going to be managed. In addition to the personnel assigned to migration tasks, you’ll need people who will be constantly monitoring and managing the process. This will help keep the migration on task.
• Non-Core Options for SaaS: Naturally, applications that generate revenue for the company are often prioritized for cloud migration. Yet, there are many applications that don’t produce direct revenue that could bring immense benefits to your business if you migrated to SaaS applications— CRM, payroll and email, to name a few. Outsourcing these services can help your business remain competitive.
• Tackle Legacy Apps: You likely have legacy applications that are still in place because they currently work well and/or may require a greater technical lift to migrate to the cloud. For this reason, moving them to the cloud may not be at the top of your priority list. These apps work now, but may not always. So, having a plan in place to tackle your legacy apps’ migration to the cloud is important, too, even if they won’t be migrated right away.

Preparing Your Organization for the Future with Cloud Adoption

Migrating to the cloud is simply a smart decision for any organization today, no matter the size or industry.

Simply deciding on utilizing the cloud isn’t enough; developing a strong cloud adoption strategy will be essential to the success of the migration work.

For organizations adding a cloud migration project to their task list, Techmate can be a scalable resource that allows teams to take on larger initiatives without losing the ability to deliver routine assignments or handle other ongoing projects.To learn more about how we can benefit your cloud adoption strategy, contact us today.