Overview
“Cloud is an enabler, not a goal”
To fully harness the benefits of the cloud, it’s essential to develop a clear understanding of how it can serve your strategic goals and objectives. “Why are we moving to cloud?” This is a question to answer before addressing the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. Without a clear purpose, the journey to cloud can encounter resistance, disappointment, and ultimately, failure.?
There are multiple ways you can adopt cloud and aligning with your business strategy will guide you in making the right choices. You need to understand the mission, vision and strategy of the organisation as well as the drivers that different stakeholders have, to transition to cloud. Once understood, you should translate it to what is needed within the organisation to support change and how cloud can contribute. A SWOT analysis helps in identifying focus areas for cloud capability development. Don’t forget to visualise the strategy to effectively communicate it. Evaluate the impact of the cloud strategy on the IT and digital strategy of the organisation as they may conflict. ?
Executing a cloud strategy means migrating applications to cloud. A decision tree will help you determine which application goes to which cloud. Without it, you will not be able to reap the foreseen benefits of your cloud strategy. Moving applications to cloud has a profound impact in terms of architecture. Guiding principles on Enterprise Architecture level are needed. A visualisation of the future cloud environment provides insights into the architectural changes. An initial – high level – business case will help overcome resistance and support the choice to move on with execution of the strategy.?
Executing the business strategy will lead to achieving business outcomes followed by new business objectives. The business strategy will also change due to changing needs and circumstances. Therefore, aligning the cloud strategy with the business, digital and IT strategy should be a recurring process until the objectives of the cloud strategy have been realised and applying cloud technology has become a natural part of the enterprise’s way-of-working.
Activities checklist
Initial:
- Identifying the stakeholders that must contribute to the cloud strategy?
- Defining or clarifying the organisation mission, vision and business strategy?
- Gathering cloud drivers?
- Visualising the cloud strategy (e.g., strategy map or cloud storyline)?
- Conducting a SWOT analysis ?
- Creating a decision tree to determine the preferred cloud (strategic landing zone)?
- Determining the guiding principles that influence the Enterprise Architecture?
- Visualising the future cloud environment?
- Drafting an initial – high level – business case
Recurring:
- Communicating the cloud strategy pro-actively?
- Periodically aligning the cloud strategy with the business, digital and IT strategy
RASCI
| cloud consultant | responsible | transformation consultant | consulting |
| cloud architect | supporting | cloud partners | |
| cloud security specialist | DevOps team | ||
| cloud developer | business stakeholder | consulting | |
| cloud engineer | architecture | consulting | |
| cloud analyst | security | consulting | |
| product owner CCoE | finance | consulting | |
| management | accountable | procurement |