With so many guides on best practice, available, a natural response would be not ANOTHER one. In response to this I have sought to keep this guide brief, pragmatic and relevant to everyone in the business.
Understand what you want to achieve as a business (but keep it fluid): Establish clear targets & metrics aligned to the business objectives. Define success factors, track and measure progress.
Adopt a cloud first approach: This is not the same as a cloud only approach. The cloud first approach starts with looking for cloud-based solutions, but it does not eliminate the possibility of other solutions. This provides greater flexibility for the business.
Understand the true/real costs: Total cost is not simply measured in monetary terms. Cloud economics considers BUSINESS VALUE and FINANCIAL MGT.
- Cost Savings – Financial benefits can be significant but are not the only measure
- Staff Productivity – By automating processes and with less demand for manual maintenance your people are better placed to work on the business. Innovating to drive and accelerate business success;
- Operational Resilience – Achieved through outsourcing your IT hardware and infrastructure needs to reputable 3rd party providers with a vested interest to deliver secure, reliable scalable services at the best price;
- Business Agility – The ability to respond to changes in the market, making use of always up to date advancements in technology at no additional cost to gain competitive advantage.
Build a minimum viable cloud: The Cloud version of MVP demonstrated viability of cloud services. This is characterised by a well-defined baseline, automation and the ability for a business to innovate and re-deploy often.
Ensure you are cloud ready?
- Do your people have the skills and experience to transition?
- Will your business culture embrace the cloud? Embracing the cloud is not an end solution, it is a process. Will you accept a level of experimentation?
- Are your applications and workloads ready for migration?
Automate: A key advantage of the cloud is the ease at which you can automate procedures and trigger events. Example: auto adjust your cloud to scale capacity based on increasing or decreasing traffic flows to a website.
Well architected: Like any system a cloud environment should be intentionally designed to meet the business needs and be able to easily scale over time.
Cloud adoption is a marathon not a sprint, adopting best practice from the outset allows you to benefit from the experience and lessons learnt by others giving you a strong point of departure and assurance of continued success. At 1Tech we have been focused on our client’s business needs for 20 years.
To find out how we can help you we please visit www.1tech.co or contact us on info@1tech.co
Greg