Take a Cookbook Approach to Accelerate Cloud Success
Over the past several years, cloud adoption has evolved from a risky proposition into an inevitability for most organizations.
While many of the technical challenges related to cloud migrations and operations have been solved – we see organizations still struggle with prioritization of their cloud migration efforts.
For good reason. There is no “one size fits all” approach to cloud adoption – in fact, it is affected by many factors:
- Digital business transformation initiatives involve a collaboration of infrastructure and applications where services are delivered by a federation of related systems. However, with this robust collaboration also comes complexity.
- If you have a mixture of legacy and mainframe based applications, you may need to continue with a data center or colocation approach until you eventually migrate to cloud friendly architectures.
- If you have a long term lease in conventional hosting environments, you may not get ROI benefits from cloud hosting until your legacy environments can be fully retired. An empty data center or colo space still costs money until the contract expires.
- If you are running out of hosting space in your current environment, then cloud is a great option. In this case, you need to decide if you want to just use cloud for net new applications. Or you may have some stand-alone applications that are ideal candidates to migrate to the cloud which can free up space in a currently stressed facility.
- Organizations also must consider information security and compliance regulations for your specific industry. If you deal with personal data regulations such as PCI, GDPR or HIPAA, then you need to account for this in your cloud approach. This does not “knock out” cloud, but it will affect planning and execution of a cloud migration.
- A recent merger or acquisition may force an app rationalization process before a viable cloud strategy can be developed.
At TDS, we believe that The Cloud Strategy Cookbook from Gartner is a good way to add discipline, consistency and guard rails to assure successful outcomes in your journey to the cloud. Proper planning for cloud migrations requires a cookbook approach.
It also requires a comprehensive inventory of your full application portfolio and infrastructure environment. With a complete view, you can easily identify “cloud ready” applications and workloads while working on more detailed planning for the more complex migration initiatives.
We are happy to offer Gartner’s Cloud Strategy Cookbook 2019, along with our thoughts on how you can accelerate your cloud journey. It starts with aligning business and IT objectives, then breaking through silo-based operations, and getting a clear, actionable view of your environment.
