Why a Cloud Adoption Methodology?
Although the cloud offers tremendous flexibility in design choices, enterprises need a proven and consistent methodology for adopting cloud technologies. and helping guide decisions in an agnostic fashion throughout cloud adoption.
However, cloud adoption is only a means to an end. Successful cloud adoption starts well before a cloud platform vendor is selected. It begins when business and IT decision makers realise that the cloud can accelerate a specific business transformation objective. The Cloud Adoption Methodology or Framework can help them align strategies for business, culture, and technical change to achieve their desired business outcomes.
When customers might still be in the process of choosing a cloud vendor or may have an multicloud strategy, the framework provides cloud-agnostic guidance for strategic decisions whenever possible.
The framework gives customers a set of tools, guidance, and narratives that help shape technology, business, and people strategies for driving desired business outcomes during their adoption effort. This guidance aligns to the following phases of the cloud adoption lifecycle, ensuring easy access to the right guidance at the right time.
Strategy – Define business justification and expected outcomes.
Plan – Align actionable adoption plans to business outcomes.
Ready – Prepare the cloud environment for the planned changes.
Migrate – Migrate and modernise existing workloads.
Innovate – Develop new cloud-native or hybrid solutions.
Govern – Govern the environment and workloads.
Manage – Operations management for cloud and hybrid solutions.
The above categories demonstrate the overall Cloud Journey lifecycle and to support customers throughout each phase of adoption by providing methodologies as specific approaches to overcoming common blockers.
One of our experienced Cloud Architects would serve as the thought leader and facilitator to bring multiple lines of business together to run these workshops to facilitate the right conversations with the right audiences and drive decision-making. Business transformation that’s empowered by the cloud depends on the Cloud Architect role to help guide decisions throughout the business and IT. Each section of the Cloud Adoption Framework represents a different specialisation or variant of the Cloud Architect role.
A Successful Cloud Adoption
Although references here can follow with cloud-neutral theory that can scale across many business and technical decisions.
Throughout this framework, enablement is a core theme. The following checklist itemizes fundamental cloud adoption principles that ensure an adoption journey is considered successful by both IT and the business that the Cloud Architecture team can assist with:
- Plan: Establishing clear business outcomes, a clearly defined digital estate plan, and well-understood adoption backlogs.
- Ready: Ensure the readiness of staff through skills and learning plans.
- Operate: Define a manageable operating model to guide activities during and long after adoption.
- Organize: Align people and teams to deliver proper cloud operations and adoption.
- Govern: Align proper governance disciplines to consistently apply cost management, risk mitigation, compliance, and security baselines across all cloud adoption.
- Manage: Ongoing operational management of the IT portfolio to minimise interruptions to business processes and ensure stability of the IT portfolio.
- Support: Align proper training, education, partnership and support options.
Another core theme is security, which is a critical quality attribute for a successful cloud adoption. Security is integrated throughout the framework to provide integrated guidance on maintaining confidentiality, integrity, and availability assurances for your cloud workloads.
