One of the strategic decisions you should consider before using Microsoft’s CAF (Cloud Adoption Framework) is the speed of cloud adoption. Cloud Architect, Ken Knight, explains a few strategies behind adoption speeds and modernization motivations that could influence your timeline.

Introduction

The Cloud brings many advantages to organizations over running an on-premises infrastructure. The decision on how fast an organization should adopt the cloud depends on how quickly it can reap the benefits and affect the bottom line.

Common factors that can influence cloud adoption speed:

• End of life hardware costing too much to operate
• Business need to drive IT costs down
• Competitive disadvantages
• Global growth opportunities
• Corporate Initiative speed
  
  

On Premise Costs

One of the primary reasons to move to the cloud is the cost of renewing your on-premises support contract for outdated hardware. Both for the OS and infrastructure, support costs go up as the equipment gets older. Additionally, the cost to continually power legacy hardware can be higher than purchasing new.

A primary cost in on-premises hardware is the overhead of managing the physical real estate. Security, taxes, maintenance, and bandwidth can all be expensive, especially if you are near a city.

Business agility

Business agility can be a soft benefit calculation for a lot of scenarios but there are a few hard facts to consider:

• Cloud provisioning can be done in minutes vs on premise which can take months.
• On-premise acquisitions are sunk/fixed costs with overhead. With cloud storage you can de-provision as demands fluctuate to save money quickly.
• On premise requires complex contract negotiation for support, with cloud its baked in.

On most of these fronts the cloud allows you to spin up initiatives quickly as new opportunities or needs arise. This flexibility allows you to try, fail fast, try again and drive innovation, for far less cost than on premise. The most successful initiatives are usually characterized by dramatically faster time-to-value realization. These factors drive agility for even the largest organizations and may bring a business competitive advantage over those not taking advantage of cloud benefits as quickly.

Culture

Change creates questions and makes people anxious or even fearful for one's job. There is an inherent resistance to change which can be a major factor in how fast you can move to the cloud. To be successful, you not only need to move workloads but also change mindsets across the whole organization. This can be challenging with large organizations that have disparate systems and teams. Some changes that often result from cloud adoption include:

• New HR cloud job roles and training programs on new methodologies and technology
• Transforming to agile project delivery
• Adapting to an operational environment that is constantly changing
• Increased focus on cost containment
• Redefining Security, Operations, DevOps, Audit Process
  
  

Speed of Adoption

Here are three cloud adoption strategies to consider:

Organic
No corporate pressure applied. As teams see fit to move to the cloud they move. Usually this scenario is already in play as innovative teams start prototyping or even moving some workloads into the cloud. This approach is less stressful if your organizations are small and operate independently, however if your organizations are large and interconnected this can lead to chaos as systems are deployed in different regions in non-standard insecure ways.

Pragmatic
This planned approach strikes a balance between the transition cost of moving and the realization of cost savings from moving. Initial workloads that can benefit the most from agility in the cloud are prioritized to move first. As the savings are realized, they pay the way for further movement to the cloud. This approach minimizes upfront transition costs and has a good return on investment time frame.

Enthusiastic
The benefits of moving to the cloud bring dramatic opportunities like world-wide growth that cannot be realized on-premises. Therefore, an increased investment is made up front to accelerate the move to the cloud to realize those dramatic benefits sooner. Moving fast can be very successful if you also ensure the resultant deployments are dynamic in nature so that operational cost savings can be realized as well. Failure to do things like environment reduction (only use test environments when testing) can end up increasing costs and should be avoided.

Regardless of your cloud migration motivation, having an experienced guide can help you avoid the common cloud adoption pitfalls and reduce operational interruptions throughout your cloud journey. Valorem Reply offers a variety of IT Modernization solutions to help at any stage of your journey. To speak with one of our Cloud Strategy, Adoption, and Optimization Specialists, reach out to us at marketing@valorem.com.