How moving to the cloud affects your organization

Need to shift operating model

Over the past few months, we conducted interviews with a number of CIOs of multinationals in different industries, including telco, financial services and fast-moving consumer products. 

For all the CIOs it is clear that cloud solutions and having an IT stack in the cloud are here to stay. Their organizations are already starting to move a substantial amount of their workloads into the public cloud. However, we see that the main reasons and the most important barriers are really beginning to change. Where traditionally IT organizations treated cloud solutions purely as just an alternative for a data center or hosting solution, the impact of cloud is going beyond the technical domain. There is a clear need to shift their operating model to benefit optimally from the cloud opportunity for their business and organization. 

Hence, this blog series. In an age of digital disruption, companies face increasing pressure to improve time to market and ensure their offerings are best in class. If companies are willing to transform their operations and business models, cloud solutions can become a critical element of their competitiveness instead of just a cost to be managed. 

Cloud solutions can provide organizations flexibility and help accelerate the deployment of new solutions. Contrary to public perception, security is no longer a barrier to move to the cloud but something that can be taken care of when taking the right steps. Current platforms are providing an ever-growing toolset to ensure that companies can safely move to the cloud. And another, often neglected, advantage is the crucial role that HR cloud solutions can play in driving employee satisfaction and engagement and in generating data for the emerging wave of talent analytics.

Hybrid environments

Before organizations can fully profit from these advantages, though, they have to embark on a cloud transition journey. Their starting point is often a complex real world of applications and infrastructures on premises, hosted and outsourced in different combinations. For some areas in the IT state there might be readily available SaaS solutions in the market, while other custom-made applications might not be ready for the cloud in the foreseeable future. This makes moving to the cloud a complex journey. 

The journey starts with a solid cloud strategy taking into account not only the existing estate of applications and infrastructure, but also addressing the future needs of the business and the impact on organization, processes and compliance. Achieving a unified view across a hybrid IT and public cloud estate is no small feat. An assessment needs to be conducted of what legacy applications can move to the cloud and at what pace. After that, the platform that suits the business need best needs to be assessed in detail. Most of the CIOs we spoke with work with several cloud providers to ensure the entire platform is always available and secure.

Three stages of the cloud transition journey

In the next three blogs we will dive deeper into the three stages of the cloud transition journey as defined by Deloitte. To embark on the journey into the cloud, organizations needs to initiate, engage and converge. This entails understanding both the importance and potential of the cloud, which will enable early adopters to take the first steps and ensure that the key stakeholders have a shared vision. 

Once this is achieved, companies can move on to the second stage in their journey, which is all about adjusting the cloud strategy and implementation to the business needs. Defining their operating model, assessing organizational readiness, driving broader adoption and extending cloud capabilities where possible. 

In the last stage of the cloud transformation journey, organizations need to optimize and innovate their cloud strategy. They can do this by continuously refining cloud capabilities for strategic impact and relentlessly challenging their own operating model and perspective to foster innovation.

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More information?

With Deloitte’s cloud migration services, we are helping large corporations navigate their cloud transition journeys. We understand not only the technology challenges that organizations face, but also the implications for finance, operating model, regulatory compliance, line of business and more.

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