Slow Cloud Adoption | OneNeck Managed Cloud Service Provider

If there’s one thing that large enterprises all the way down to mom-and-pop shops have in common, it’s the lure of the quick win. Every business is hyper focused on the bottom line, and what they can do to drive quick growth, which has been one of the primary drivers in the race to the cloud. It just makes sense. The cloud enables faster delivery of services, in turn, faster profit.

And while it seems like most organizations are sprinting at a breakneck speed to the cloud, there are many reasons it makes sense to slow down and take a more methodical and strategic pace. This means adopting the cloud on a project-by-project basis, leading to an overall cloud adoption based on many individual successes.

The benefits of this approach can lead to…

• Cloud and People Alignment: When you think about how the average person operates, we tend to think and deliver in steps. We see an end goal, sure, but then chunk out the tasks that get us to that goal. It also gives us small accomplishments along the way, which goes a long way to building and keeping us positive as we strive toward a larger goal. Similarly, by tackling the move to the cloud in incremental projects, it gives IT teams, LOB stakeholders, and even leadership quick wins with faster return.
• Leadership Support: By tackling the move to the cloud in smaller increments, it is easier to demonstrate ROI on a more-regular basis, building the necessary trust and buy-in that leads to increased funding for future cloud projects.
• Upfront Planning Pays Off: Like any major initiative, the more time to plan, the better the outcome. Choosing the right cloud is only one part of the equation. The applications and workloads going into the cloud can add huge complexity. And then beyond that, how will they integrate with existing platforms, and where will the data intersect and reside? These are only a few of the factors that must be part of a comprehensive plan.
• Clearly Articulated Migration Path: In a recent study conducted by 451 Research on behalf of OneNeck, they found that the biggest challenge for IT is the migration to off-premises cloud/hosted IT environments. This comes as no surprise as we continue to see our customers struggle with this very challenge on a daily basis. A fail-proof migration plan needs to include extensive upfront analysis to help identify the gaps between where the workload currently resides and what it will take to move it to the cloud. Then the actual migration must be mapped out, including connecting the cloud-based workload to on-premises applications, data migration and then testing to ensure it is optimized and meeting the needs of the business. And don’t forget to include the management of the workload once it is in the cloud.
• Upfront Security Focus: In today’s landscape of increasing cyberthreats, no organization can afford to lose sight of security. Yet often with numerous and disparate cloud migrations in process, things slip through the cracks. Security should be a top priority at all times, but it’s critical to make an evaluation of your security needs in the early stages of cloud migration planning. Do you have visibility across your cloud platforms from a single pane of glass? What security frameworks are your cloud providers utilizing? Are there compliance mandates, like HIPAA or FedRAMP you need to consider? And one of the biggest challenges, what are the dependencies among your workloads in various platforms? A tactical and step-by-step approach to cloud adoption can help ensure that gaps in security aren’t missed, keeping you safe in the long run.

While a sweeping, let’s-go-for-it approach to cloud adoption can work, the short-sprint approach will most-often be a safer one that allows for demonstrated ROI throughout the process. And who doesn’t love a quick win?

 

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