We reveal our 5 top tips to successful cloud adoption which will allow you to see technology as an enabler to business growth and innovation

As cloud computing starts to become a commodity for many organisations, others are struggling to realise the full value from their investment, or worse, they don’t know where to start on their cloud adoption journey and are falling behind their competition.

Many IT leaders want to understand how to begin their cloud adoption journey; they may already have a clear direction on their cloud adoption roadmap, or they may need some help understanding which direction to take (and how to get there), or perhaps they have a unique application idea which will engage customers better, increase revenues or digitise processes to improve profit – all of which are easier to achieve with cloud.

In this blog, we reveal our 5 top tips to successful cloud adoption which will allow you to see technology as an enabler to business growth and innovation.

1. Build a business case

Cloud adoption can be challenging for a lot of businesses who are new to the technology and many teams are still coming to understand the ROI of adopting cloud.

A shift in technology, personnel, culture, and billing are just a few things to consider and it’s important to involve all stakeholders throughout to create the best possible business case. There’s also a few questions to ask; expect an upfront investment in staff or Capex, do you understand the effects of moving to an Opex cost model? Understand your existing technical capabilities, is your software stack ready for this? Plan for different adoption phases, can your migration run over a period of time?

It’s key to find an expert partner who’s done this before to help you build a resilient business case.

2. Governance is king

As your cloud environment scales, there’s a delicate balance between agility and control. By defining and applying policies, governance and configuration, management can ensure operational consistency and control of your public cloud environment. Keep a close eye on your financial operations within your platform using automation, tagging, and monitoring tools. And of course, always follow vendor best practice guides, such as the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure and the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

3. Don’t expect to do it all at once

It’s always recommended to perform a full assessment of your application environment to first understand migration risks, how is best to migrate and application dependencies. An assessment will help you perform bill estimations and assess internal cloud readiness for operational procedures, tooling, procurement, and skills.  By understanding your current application landscape, you can define not only your future state architecture in cloud, but also your optimal transition roadmap.

4. Keep track of your budget and performance

Technology is limitless, your budget isn’t. Don’t let your spending run away now you have unlimited possibilities with technology. Budget management and performance tools can provide deeper insights into how your cloud spend is being used. This will help you understand if it’s being spent in the best possible ways, areas for improvement and you can even control where your admins can place workloads to limit spend.

5. Consider your people and culture

Take the time to understand your existing technical capabilities, new technology doesn’t have to mean new people. Take your technical teams on your cloud adoption journey with you, plan to train the team members that want to be part of your cloud adoption and explain they’ll be part of the new world.

Effective communication across your organisation is critical to the success of your cloud adoption strategy. We’d suggest involving stakeholders from across the business in design workshops and technical discussions.

Wherever you are in your cloud adoption journey, ANS can help you make the most of your cloud environment, now and in the future. Find out how our Cloud Migration Navigator can help you manage the complexities of moving to cloud while providing you with board-ready outputs and a full business case.