8 Steps To Success In The Cloud

Without having to go through their own capex approval processes, they can quickly test the market, perhaps even gaining first-mover advantage into an embryonic new market segment set to flourish.

The agility in being able to ramp up or ramp down computing power – rather than struggling to optimize fixed capacity across squabbling internal departments that run hot and cold between either demanding instant resource or alternatively trying to get out of the cross charge that comes with carrying excess server capacity in order to cater for such peak loads. As such, cloud really ought to be a win-win situation for both front line business units and for the support services.

But transitioning to the cloud involves a significant amount of business process and culture change. So the Sand Hill paper, titled ‘8 Steps to Cloud Success A Cloud Roadmap is the Path to Business Agility’ sets out a draft of what a company’s cloud strategy and roadmap should look like.

Initially, you might think their eight steps look somewhat generic – I know I did – but there is some excellent advice in the detail,

1. Adopt a progressive mindset: Spearheading disruptive change in the organization will be the most difficult part of the journey and the paper gives lots of sound advice on building consensus and overcoming fear. But one department that needs particular attention is IT itself where there is potentially more vested interests.
2. Watch, learn, and experiment: Take baby steps by experimenting with non – strategic projects to acclimate the company to a new way of doing business, perhaps starting with a private cloud as a way of minimizing perceived risk.
3. Demonstrate quick wins; Start with some short-term tactical initiatives that are capable of delivering quick wins before leaping head first into the more strategic projects that are critical to business value.
4. Develop a business case; there are really only two reasons for going into the cloud, improving business agility as mentioned above and delivering operational excellence by enjoying improved availability, reliability, and a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). The study found that, even if the cost of moving to the end-state from the current state is $5 million (for example), most small to midsize companies will move ahead with the initiative if the end-state generates cost savings of more than, say, $10 million per year.
5. Understand the risks; Like any new technology that offers business value, there are also risks associated with security, privacy and governance. Even though major cloud providers offer encryption and security standards way beyond those most major companies have or can even afford  for themselves, formally assess all risks and conduct due diligence to understand each vendor’s offering.
6. Analyze the current IT portfolio categorising systems as core/non-core; working well/ weak; cost-effective/expensive to identify where to begin.
7. Create a vision of the end-state so that everyone can see how they and the business benefit from the transition, setting out which architectural components, data, applications, systems, services, and processes will move to the cloud and in what order – and how legacy systems are integrated.
8. Develop and execute the roadmap; For each of the identified applications, evaluate each vendor’s offering to ensure that it meets the security, scalability, reliability, data privacy and governance needs of the enterprise and meets established security and compliance standards (e.g. SAS 70, FISMA, ISO/ IEC 27001, PCI, and HIPAA etc) – and critically identify any needs not covered in the vendor’s standard SLA that may require bespoke development.

The paper concludes that transitioning to the cloud is similar to a major change initiative and needs top management support, clear vision, and careful planning. However, I would add that most companies already have some experience of working with SaaS or cloud, typically in HR or Marketing, so there is experience to build on as cloud migration takes hold.