Define your “as-is” and “to-be” states
Mock-up your current multi-cloud architecture, identifying and categorizing any issues. Determine the strategic vision for your “to-be” state, depicting target workload deployments, planned cloud services, and environmental connectivity.
Gauge your teams’ cloud readiness
Discuss the different stakeholders impacted by cloud adoption, and how to build around their strengths using familiar tools and processes. Work to align IT and developers or end-users around common goals.
Construct your cloud adoption roadmap
As you begin building your cloud strategy, understand how business priorities, available resources and the scale of your strategy will drive your cloud modernization and migration initiatives. Allow your business requirements to determine the scale and sequence of your cloud adoption.
Below, we have mocked up an example of an organization, with 1,000 apps, choosing to take a three-phase approach. Oftentimes organizations will have to complete the four cloud adoption steps multiple times, accounting for different levels of application prioritization. Cloud implementation is a complicated process, and there are no definitive timelines to follow — simply work to put an actionable plan into place that aligns to your business and IT objectives.
VOLUME
The amount of data you need to move and manage.
MOVEMENT
The needed mobility of your data between environments and associated fees.
VELOCITY
The speed at which data is processed and the ability to meet real-time needs.
UTILIZATION
How often you’ll need to leverage data and what kind of processing power you’ll need.
SENSITIVITY
The level at which data must be protected, and your ability to meet data sovereignty needs.
REDUNDANCY
Following best practices for backup and disaster recovery.
Developers and users need cloud technologies to drive productivity and agility, but they will be hesitant at anything that creates undue friction and impedes innovation.
Solution: Embrace cloud-native development and cloud flexibility to boost agility, incorporating existing tools and processes.
IT will be on the front line of organizational change, welcoming simplified processes and management but may be challenged by cloud migrations.
Solution: Focus on increasing visibility and control across cloud environments for your IT team via consistent operations and infrastructure.
In order to remain competitive, your leaders need a cloud deployment that is flexible while staying on budget.
Solution: Strategically place workloads to meet present and future business needs, ensuring your cost model provides flexibility.
By now, your proposed strategy should be validated. Now, establish connections between your environments to enable operational consistency and workload mobility.
Operational consistency helps you overcome the complexity of managing disparate environments and security policies across clouds. As the needs of your business will change over time, it’s crucial to build in the necessary flexibility to shift workloads to a more suitable environment.
Enabling IT automation
The way organizations need to deliver IT is changing. Previously, organizations thought about IT in a project mentality, with tasks assigned and passed between teams in a waterfall methodology. This process has failed to keep up with the speed of business, due to the wide variety of disciplines needing to work together and the multiple, time-consuming handoffs required.
You must instead deliver IT through a services mentality. Funnel work through a self-service cloud portal or equivalent application programing interfaces (APIs), and define policies that enable your organization to automate their tasks and delivery of necessary infrastructure to your business units. Use the power and flexibility of the cloud to transform your entire organization, saving time and resources while streamlining operations.
Now it is time to begin operating your cloud environments. Implement appropriate monitoring tools, then begin running your workloads and measuring performance and productivity.
Delivering cloud capabilities to all environments
Your organization’s cloud success is directly tied to the operating model you put in place to manage your cloud environments. If your workloads are not compatible and consistent, you will not gain the flexibility and agility you intended.
You must be able to freely place workloads unbounded by operational constraints while exercising control over every environment.
Your developers will have access to the resources they need at any time, your analysts can glean insights from all your organization’s data, and – most importantly — your assets will be protected by a single set of policies spanning the entire system.
After you have started operating your environment and have begun gathering data on how resources are performing, it is important to re-engage your core group of stakeholders with this information. Analyze your environment against your pre-determined success metrics and establish a plan to course correct where needed, scale out where appropriate and implement new capabilities.
What to check for:
What to check for:
