Steps to enterprise cloud adoption

The recent pandemic has made amply clear the importance of the cloud in enabling digital transformation for businesses. Given its inherent capability to scale and be resilient, the cloud has become a critical lever of transformation for all businesses.

As per a Gartner report in 2021, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is expected to grow 18.4% in 2021 to total $304.9 billion, up from $257.5 billion in 2020. The proportion of IT spending shifting to the cloud will accelerate in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, with the cloud projected to make up 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024, up from 9.1% in 2020.

As the demand for cloud-based solutions continues to expand, businesses need to adopt a comprehensive cloud strategy for their enterprise. Without it, the transformation will not be complete and could result in cost and operational overheads.

So, what does one need to develop an enterprise cloud strategy?

At Great Innovus, we recommend a 5-stage approach to a cloud strategy as mentioned below:

1 Define your objective for the cloud

Like with most other technology solutions, the cloud solution has also to be specific to your business and its needs. So, it is essential that you start with clear goals on what you want to achieve from the cloud. You can begin by listing down the problems/challenges in your current system to get to that. Some of the critical parameters that could come out of this exercise could be improved customer experience, Reduced time to market, cost optimization, or Competitive advantage. There are also other additional advantages that the cloud can provide in terms of Backup & Recovery and security.

2  Baseline your As-Is state

Having identified the goals for cloud adoption, the next step would be to assess and baseline your organization's current state of IT/Application infrastructure. Doing this will help you identify the order of priority for migrating them to the cloud and any specific dependencies that need to be addressed before moving them to the cloud. It would help to consider which of your business functions would go to the cloud-first depending on various parameters, including criticality, dependencies, and ease of migration.

3 Choose your cloud deployment model

Based on your business objectives and the type of apps to be moved to the cloud, you can choose from one of the following cloud deployment models:

• Private cloud
• Public cloud
• Hybrid cloud
• Community cloud
• Multi-cloud

4 Define your cloud migration strategy

The most important challenge while moving the applications to the cloud is to decide whether to rehost or redesign or replace them. With rehosting, you deploy the application from your current infra to the new cloud infra. Certain applications may have been designed in line with the existing infra-architecture. Such applications will need to be redesigned before moving them to the cloud. Another benefit of this whole activity would be to identify applications that are to be discarded, and you can replace them with applications built on the latest technologies.

5 Cloud governance

Having moved your applications to the cloud, it is important to have a clear plan to monitor critical factors like performance, cost, and security. A cloud governance framework helps your organization deliver consistent outcomes from your cloud adoption.

It focuses on three primary parameters:

• > Business objectives
• > People (the team that will define, implement, and maintain)
• > Tools

The most crucial cog though in this journey is to identify your right partner for this all-important transformation. We at Great Innovus have a team of experts delivering cloud solutions right from ideation, design to implementation and support.

Just drop us a message on your needs, and we will be happy to help you.