Developing strategies for Cloud

Introduction

Cloud services have matured significantly in recent years and the adoption strategies of corporates have developed. Formerly, cases for change were frequently framed around replacing traditional hardware and hosting with a more scalable, elastic and consumption-based infrastructure delivery model. Additionally, many major Cloud providers made services available from Swiss located data centres, enabling some of our Swiss clients to leverage Cloud services while complying with regulations and legal requirements.

Our experience of building cases for cloud adoption has led us to build cloud strategy quickly and efficiently, starting with the definition of a vision. For example, as part of their vision, one of our Swiss global clients has the ambition to leverage the global satellite network (made available through a major Cloud provider) to improve their services in remote locations.

How to develop your adoption strategy for Cloud

Whilst most large organisations now recognise that the foreseeable future is hybrid i.e. mixing on premise and various cloud services based on requirements, many organisations have adopted cloud technologies in a piecemeal fashion. Without a strategy for cloud adoption, organisations may be subject to “cloud sprawl”, which drives up costs and can lead to issues with compliance and security. For these reasons it is critical for organisations to develop a coherent cloud strategy.

Our experience of building cases for cloud adoption has led us to build cloud strategy quickly and efficiently, starting with the definition of a vision. As an example, one of our Swiss global clients had as part of their vision the ambition to leverage the global satellite network made available through a major Cloud provider to improve their services in remote locations. The strategy is modelled using six building blocks as shown below in Figure 1: Cloud strategy building blocks. These blocks help us design a comprehensive strategy and answer key questions faced by an organisation.

Figure 1: Cloud strategy building blocks

• Create a vision:
  Capture a vision using new technologies such as Cloud and impact to both current and future state business models.
  
• Create a baseline:
  Develop a baseline of technology capabilities, infrastructure services and in-flight projects using current state workload analysis, technical requirement identification, and business and technology process assessment.
  
• Strategic decisions:
  The outcome of the baseline helps an organisation make strategic & tactical decisions including the types of Cloud, platforms and managed services.
  
• Organisational impact:
  Set the tone for realigning the organisation to operate Cloud, decide on execution strategy and consider a Cloud Centre of Excellence to incubate the change. Full process re-engineering leveraging agile, DevOps, infrastructure as code, and IT automation to create a new model for delivering technology to clients.
  
• Financial impact:
  Create an operational viewpoint with cost model, future spending and savings.
  
• Roadmap:
  Create a path to move to Cloud whilst achieving business outcomes efficiently.
   

Using an iterative Cloud Strategy development process

We believe that it is critical for organisations to quickly gain some execution experience upon laying out the initial direction for cloud adoption. This helps in understanding the benefits of Cloud first-hand, and uncover additional set of strategic and operational questions which need to be answered. Hence, we recommend organisations to follow an iterative approach (indicated in Figure 2 below) starting with a directional cloud strategy, followed by execution experience with on-going detailing and evolution of the Cloud Strategy artefact.

Figure 2: Iterative cloud adoption development approach