Defining Your Cloud Strategy
Cloud adoption is growing exponentially as it helps drive business transformation. Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework helps simplify the process.
According to Gartner, the global public cloud service market is projected to reach $266 billion by the end of 2020. Additionally, more than $1.3 TRILLION in IT spending will be affected by the shift to the cloud by 2022. It is clear this shift to the cloud from small businesses up through the largest enterprises is growing exponentially. Organizations of all sizes adopt the cloud to help drive business transformation, such as process and product improvement, market growth, and increased profitability. The cloud delivers fundamental technology benefits that can help businesses execute multiple business strategies. With cloud-based approaches, you can become more agile, reduce costs, accelerate time to market, and enable expansion into new markets. Understanding the advantages of cloud adoption to a service like Microsoft Azure is important, but there are still remaining questions of Why/When/How do we migrate?
Fortunately, Microsoft has developed a process to help, Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. Per Microsoft, “The Cloud Adoption Framework is the One Microsoft approach to cloud adoption in Azure, consolidating and sharing best practices from Microsoft employees, partners, and customers. The framework gives customers a set of tools, guidance, and narratives that help shape technology, business, and people strategies for driving desired business outcomes during their adoption effort. This guidance aligns to the following phases of the cloud adoption lifecycle, ensuring easy access to the right guidance at the right time.”
Ultimately, the Cloud Adoption Framework helps customers undertake a simplified cloud journey in three main stages:
- Plan
- Ready
- Adopt
These three main stages are preceded by a business strategy phase and surrounded by an operations phase that expands through the cloud adoption journey. The below graphic illustrates this process:
Courtesy of Microsoft: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/microsoft-cloud-adoption-framework-for-azure/3-define-strategy
Across organizations of all types, sizes, and industries, the decision to invest in cloud technologies is often tightly connected to a critical business event. The reason for this connection is because the cloud might enable the appropriate solution for the event. Proper cloud technology implementation might turn a reactive response into an innovation opportunity to drive growth for the organization.
Motivations
There are many different motivations and triggers for cloud adoption: cost savings, operations optimization, gaining scale, reducing vendor complexity, increased agility etc. These will often differ for each business, but the advantages to seize upon opportunities that come from migrating to the cloud are somewhat universal and could include:
| Critical Business Events | Migration Motivations | Innovation Motivations |
| Mergers, acquisition, or divestiture
Reductions in capital expenses End of support for mission-critical technologies Response to regulatory compliance changes Meet new data sovereignty requirements Reduce disruptions and improve IT stability |
Reduction in vendor or technical complexity
Optimization of internal operations Increase business agility Prepare for new technical capabilities Scale to meet market demands Scale to meet geographic or market demands |
Build new technical capabilities
Modernize security posture and controls Scale to meet geographic or market demands Improve customer experiences and engagements Transform products or services Disrupt the market with new products or services
Table courtesy of Microsoft Azure
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Courtesy of Microsoft: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/microsoft-cloud-adoption-framework-for-azure/3-define-strategy
While defining your cloud strategy, considering business impact, turnaround time, performance and more are important. They allow you to see more clearly the areas of focus.
Establish clear business outcomes and define business justifications for adoption
Having a business outcome in mind that is backed by sound financial reasoning and support from the various stakeholders greatly increase the chances of a successful cloud adoption journey. There are some tools available that can support you during the financial planning process:
- Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator: Use the TCO calculator to estimate the cost savings you can realize by migrating your application workloads to Azure.
- Azure pricing calculator: Estimate your expected monthly bill by using the pricing calculator.
- Azure Cost Management: Use and manage Azure and other cloud resources through a multiple-cloud cost management solution.
Developing a clear business justification for cloud adoption with tangible, relevant costs and returns can be a complex process. First, review some common cloud computing business value areas to help justify the cloud adoption journey:
- Cost – eliminates capital expense
- Scale – ability to scale elastically, delivering the right amount of IT resources
- Productivity – removes the need for many IT management chores
- Reliability – eases the burden of data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity
Overall, it is important to understand that cloud adoption is a journey that can transform how you do business. It is a decision that requires sound thought and planning, from technical and financial stakeholders, and complete transparency and buy-in from staff to have the best chances of success.