Why Having A Cloud Strategy Is Vital To Your Cloud Journey

In this series of blogs we look at why having a solid foundation is paramount for a successful cloud adoption. In the first blog we looked at why Cloud Readiness is a key part of your cloud roadmap. In this blog we look at why implementing a Cloud Strategy clearly defines the business outcomes you seek, and how you are going to get there.

Cloud technologies are accelerating the pace of change and facilitating entirely new ways of doing business.

A cloud strategy defines the business outcomes you are looking for, and how you are going to get there. It also explores your end goals and motivation for adopting cloud. Your deciding factors could be many – cost, innovation, your need for business growth, keep up with your competitors. You also need to define the business outcomes, establish governance and control.

An organisation then needs to develop a comprehensive strategy for making the transition to a cloud-first way of working, where the cloud is the preferred and prioritised IT model. This can bring your organisation the following business benefits:

• More agility and flexibility
• Improvement of business and IT performance
• Disruptive business models
• Adaptation to a rapidly-changing digital world

When defining your cloud strategy these should be your foremost deliverables:

Cloud Business Vision:

Align your cloud strategy with business objectives to create a compelling target end-state. This will help you realise short and long-term objectives, target state, architecture, and roadmap definition.

Cloud Value Case:

Identify the costs and benefits of the next stage of your journey to the cloud. Establish the current technology baseline to develop a business case for cloud adoption, pivoting on the financial impact associated with moving to cloud

Cloud Roadmap:

A Cloud Roadmap will ensure you maximise the value from your organisations workloads in the cloud. In terms of productivity, cost reduction, and enhanced functionality. It will also protect your investment, enabling you to expand your capabilities and build on the foundation you have chosen.

Cloud Transformation Plan:

All cloud initiatives require a heavy dose of people and process investment. If you are sitting down to map out your long term cloud strategy, please make sure to anticipate the budgets and expertise required to address the cultural shift, skill gaps, learning capacity and leadership skill changes.

By having a strong foundation for your cloud journey, enabling the transition from cloud-first intent to reality. Your cloud ambitions will be clearly mapped to business results including:

Acquisition of new capabilities:

Establish democratised cloud based services to enable enhanced business capabilities.

Leveraging the cloud effectively:

Establish and syndicate the required building blocks in a secure and controlled process

Shifting of operating models:

Align your organisational structure and operating model to support and enable doing business in the cloud.

Building of modern architectures:

Design a target-state cloud architecture with the components critical to achieving your cloud objectives.

Summary

A Cloud Strategy enables you to rapidly make informed decisions around cloud direction and a method to start moving towards these objectives as soon as possible. A Cloud Strategy helps you navigate the end-to-end journey from on-premises to cloud and see the transformational capabilities of cloud for business enablement and competitive advantage.

If you would like AltoStack to show how a Cloud Strategy increases your chance to succeed, shortens implementation and saves your organisation money please contact us.