Cloud Adoption is one of the most vital strategic initiatives to begin the cloud journey or to enhance your cloud journey if you have already migrated. Cloud adoption is more than just choosing a technology, it requires planning for the future. More and more organizations want to be cloud-native and be part of this digital transformation.

It is inevitable that every strategy requires a solid plan to implement it. It is also crucial for every organization to determine advantages and adapt a proven roadmap for cloud adoption. This article is all about this.

We have already given you a jump start on Cloud Adoption and Assessment required for the same. This is our third article in the “Cloud Adoption Strategy” series. You might have filled your assessment sheet for cloud adoption, but you need to have a suitable plan to implement and get the best value of your cloud. This is what makes Planning a critical step. At this stage, you need to put your business and technical minds to build a customized plan for your “unique” cloud environment.

You need to plan to govern your Cloud Adoption Strategy, it ensures business progression and even after execution governs implementation so that your cloud strategy and business strategy are perfectly aligned.

Planning for Cloud Adoption

After assessing all your cloud requirements, you need to prioritize the tasks in order to achieve smooth and hassle-free migration. It is important to develop a customized cloud adoption strategy including the following steps in the planning phase:

1. Gather a team with the required skills to ease your cloud journey:

• Align your IT and developers’ team because these are the teams that are going to account for your maximum cloud cost.
• Plan the required programs for teams to keep them update with required skills

2. Identify the workloads or applications that you are going to deploy in the cloud environment.

3. Plan a cloud vendors selection:

• Ask your IT and developers team to have a crystal-clear list of services, type of cloud environment required to fuel your cloud strategy.
• You can further classify these requirements based on business and technical needs.

4. Understand the suitability of the cloud environment i.e. public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, etc. You can make your technical teams work on this also.

5. Design a beta cloud project:

• Plan a test deployment of a workload with no dependencies before going to major deployment.
• This will help you to test and run your selected cloud environment.

6. If the test deployment works properly, you can then prioritize the migration order of the selected workloads or applications that needs to migrate on cloud-first.

Already started planning as a completed reading the above steps? Good. You don’t need to stick to just these steps, but you can’t skip even a single step also. Nowadays, cloud adoption has gradually become easier because of the ecosystem of cloud products, services, and vendors. This cheat sheet on planning should help simplify strategy.

Planning is the loose end of cloud adoption strategy and this is followed by the Migration stage to ultimately experience the cloud technology. So, stay tuned for our next article in “Cloud Adoption Strategy Series”.