Cloud Adoption Strategy

Moving your infrastructure to the cloud is a big move for any organisation: it is vital to understand how to make those crucial first steps to take advantage of the benefits of Microsoft Azure technology.

The Cloud Adoption Framework provides guidance to help minimise pitfalls and is predicated on building clarity around the long-term strategic goals for your cloud journey.

There are several routes and cloud adoption scenarios that are dependent on where you are as a business currently.

The first step is to document your business strategy clearly to enable clear planning and the alignment of business and technical aspirations.

A key part of the process is to understand whether this is a migration from a current infrastructure set-up, whether it is on-prem or in the cloud.

Or whether the cloud adoption strategy is based around innovation. Both options require new methods and ways of operating.

Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework defines four clear steps towards building that strategy:

1. Motivations: Business transformations that are supported by cloud migration can be driven by different motivations, which need to be defined, understood, agreed upon and documented.

2. Business Outcomes: The most successful transformation journeys start with a business outcome in mind. Document your business outcomes.

3. Financial Considerations: A digital transformation goes hand-in-hand with a financial transformation. With a shift to the cloud, there are financial considerations around how the cloud will impact your financial position, accounting KPIs and processes.

4. Technical Considerations: These will help you improve how you manage and maintain your cloud and workloads, including scalability, availability, security and compliance, and capacity optimisation.

There is a lot of talk about digital transformation across all industries, with many executives combining digital transformation and cloud adoption into one over-arching technical product.

When your strategy is clear, you are in a position to move forward to the planning stage, which we will discuss in our next blog.

To discuss your cloud adoption strategy, please contact LA NET for a discussion with our expert consultants.