IT organizations recognize that they need to move to the cloud for better scalability, mobility and security. Often, this means partnering with a service provider who has the depth and breadth of expertise to provide additional support through this complex process. However, CIOs aren’t just looking for someone to help with the actual implementation of technology, they need a partner who will help them build a long-term business justification with tangible, relevant costs and returns based on their unique business objectives. This is the only way to not only secure approvals form the board to invest in cloud technology, but also ensure a successful outcome.

Four Steps to Building Your Cloud Migration Strategy

There’s no single cloud adoption path that works for every organization, but the main implementation strategies are similar for all: define your strategy, create a plan, ready your organization, and adopt the cloud. See below how your organization can adopt the cloud.

Define Strategy

There are many reasons for cloud adoption and understanding the value it brings to your organization is key to developing an effective cloud strategy. Meet with essential business leaders to determine what motivates your organization to move to the cloud. Align these motivations to your desired business outcome and decide which outcomes take priority. After setting expectations for your cloud strategy, validate your outcomes and create a financial model to project how your organization will be impacted by cloud adoption.

Plan

Once expectations have been established, you can now covert your aspirational goals into an actionable plan.  Before diving in, take note of your digital inventory; catalog all your workloads, applications, data sources and other IT assets, and determine if they should be hosted in the cloud. Once your digital inventory is aligned, establish a plan for organizational alignment to support your adoption. Create a team to maintain the speed of which the cloud is incorporated in each sector of your organization. In this way, you can create a cloud adoption plan that prioritizes your workloads based on the impact and technical complexities of your unique organization – just make sure your efforts align with your desired outcomes and overall business strategy.

Ready

With a plan in place, it is time to define required skills and support and prepare your workforce for the cloud environment. Create and implement a plan for addressing skills and the readiness gap of your workforce. Define support needs to ensure your business and IT employees are prepared for the changes with cloud adoption, because an impactful adoption requires workforce acceptance. Now that your workforce is prepared, you can build your cloud environment. Set up a landing page zone in the cloud. If you’re using Microsoft’s Azure, use the cloud adoption framework migration blueprint to set up your environment.

Adopt

It’s time to adopt your cloud system. Every organization has unique reasons for adopting the cloud, but there are two main motivations – migration and innovation. Migration focuses on moving an existing application to the cloud. This process has limited initial cloud adoption but expands to move more workloads as you learn from the initial migration. When it comes to innovation, organizations are focused on modernizing digital inventory to develop operations, drive business and product innovation.