Five Key Factors to Consider for Cloud Transitions

Cloud transitions need not only new technology, but new procedures, capacities, and expectations, all requiring learning and program management. Because of the magnitude of the changeover process, it's only right to break to the paths into smaller ones for effective execution. 

Five Key Considerations in Cloud Transitions

Prepare an analysis of your portfolio in order to establish the business case. First, you need to make a comprehensive inventory of all active systems and their dependencies. A thorough review of the complete architecture will identify current gaps and systems that should be transferred totally or partially to the cloud. All significant business IT layers, including the applications, infrastructure, databases, and middleware platforms, must be analyzed. You will need to identify and analyze the various adoption models (PaaS, SaaS, or IaaS) for the systems that are moving to the cloud. Making the best business case for moving to the cloud requires an understanding of the business drivers, connecting them to benefit metrics at the “point-of-arrival,” and generating a clear ROI based on benchmarks.

Vet different potential cloud solutions and platforms. There are various questions you need to ask about the cloud platforms and products that are in the market. What are the functional capabilities of the business application? What is the procedure of integration? Does the solutions provide out-of-the-box operational functionality, and accessible localizations? In terms of future integration and development capabilities required to commission, expand, and efficiently manage the system, how reliable and adaptable is the underlying technological platform (read PaaS)? In terms of digital solutions, especially mobility and analytics, how robust is the cloud platform? Is the solution compatible with the architecture of the existing infrastructure to make interoperability easy? Are there deployed cases of the product in the market, especially within your own industry sector?

Create your own adoption strategy based on the organization’s willingness to embrace change and capacity to oversee the basic business transformation. It is critical to get the timing of what is moved to the cloud perfect in order to decrease impact on current operations. One approach you could adopt is to shift the procurement processes to the cloud initially, trailed by the finance function, based on the department’s current business priorities or pain issues. A firm that has just acquired another company may opt to relocate the new organization first due to the smaller capital commitment required. In a developing strategy, a specific business operation, such as fleet management or quote management, is first moved to test the waters before gradually increasing functionalities over the following months.

Utilize cloud migrations to look for further opportunities for process simplification or change. When considering a shift to the business cloud, it is logical to consider products and technologies. It’s easy to overlook opportunities for process and procedure uniformity and simplification throughout the company. Reimagining UX for all stakeholders, including internal (workers) as well as external (clients, partners, and suppliers), can be a crucial improvement expected during a cloud migration. This may also be the ideal time to decide on a strategic structural reorganization that would increase yield or reduce costs, such as establishing shared services for project management and invoice/payment processing throughout the entire organization.

Analyze your internal skill set and choose a systems integrator (SI) who has a track record of success for collaborations. There are several things to look for, including the project's feasibility and track record of execution, dedication to the selected cloud prototype and domain expertise, industry-leading strategy investments, experience managing evolution, and organizational change, relationship with the OEM, depth of the offering, including service bundling and customer references, degree of automation, resource scale, geographic reach, resource quality, and expenses.