Cloud computing has become a crucial instrument to manage business-critical workflows. The chances of falling behind in the race become supremely high if there is no cloud roadmap or strategy in place. Migration to the cloud may seem overwhelming at first. This is why a well-defined cloud strategy acts as a prerequisite for organizations to make smart decisions regarding cloud initiatives. It equips you to assess your existing infrastructure to make out the fundamental blocks of your cloud plans and evaluate your existing and desired cloud state through PESTEL, Fit-Gap analysis, McFarlan IT portfolio grid, etc. One of the most important aspects is involving the right people like CIOs, application, infrastructure, and operations leader and team, and technical professional team when implementing the cloud migration initiatives. Let’s check out the points that can help you develop a strategic cloud roadmap.

• Develop a cloud migration value proposition

Cloud migration is much more than shifting workloads. Organizations need to develop a cloud migration value proposition for business and IT in the starting phases of the migration roadmap. Some of the critical tasks that you need to keep in mind are - research of cloud adoption use cases, aligning your cloud strategy with your IT objectives, considering cloud financial management, laying out actionable steps to achieve goals, understanding readiness of workload and team, application modernization strategy, vendor capabilities, and usage of data and metrics to get valuable insights.

• Create an actionable plan to gear up for the execution

Next comes selecting the right vendors and getting into negotiation to make the deal successful. For that, you need to build cloud competencies across the organization, analyze the offerings of different service providers, i.e., AWS, Azure, and GCP, prepare yourself for cloud-specific risks, and conduct in-depth research for investments to be made in networking, security, or tools. Identify and divide workloads for migration, validate a cloud management workflow, adopt best practices for execution, and practice workload placement analysis. After creating an action plan, you need to deploy and optimize workload placement.

• Establish governance, manage risks, and evolve the cloud footprint

A successful cloud migration uses Agile processes to reduce workflow disruptions, save costs, and enhance transparency. You need to conduct sensitive data discovery, use analytics, and constantly monitor. Your team can leverage third-party tools to create security control planes, develop a life cycle approach to cloud governance, and embed governance-related feedback into workflows through automation. Lastly, you can start with investments that advance current cloud strategies and execution, develop customer-focused objectives that suit cross-functional teams, and optimize cloud footprint.

Final Thoughts

Frame the cloud objectives as rushing toward the cloud without preparing succinct goals can cause more harm than good. Likewise, analyze your existing people, processes, and technology capabilities to devise a cloud strategy that yields tangible business benefits. The business leaders need to evaluate operational readiness and architecture.Understand the IT architecture requirements, make the desired state analysis, and conduct a gap analysis while assessing risk. Some examples of gaps between the present and desired state could be related to cost, security, etc. Risk assessment, when done right, can help determine potential issues. A risk assessment includes identifying potential risks and categorizing them into delivery and benefits risks.Finally, develop a cloud implementation plan to support cloud delivery through a roadmap. Here you would evaluate the dependencies if any, and a cost-benefit analysis of cloud transition projects. Create a management framework for cloud adoption, arrange resource distribution and conduct capability planning, prioritize cloud projects, develop best practices for cloud implementation, follow a governance process to assess cloud strategy, and check its successful execution.

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