Cloud Best Practices for Success in 2020

Moving to the cloud is the single most significant technology shift your company should be preparing for in 2020. However, your company must proceed with caution.

Why? Because transforming from on-premise to cloud based I.T. requires an in-depth understanding of technology. You need a detailed blueprint as one misstep can waste a lot of crucial time and money.

With this blog, we help you to kick off the new year with a perspective approach. The aim is to help businesses plan, design and build effective cloud programs.

Read below to find best practices for cloud success in 2020 —

Start with a Discussion

There are conscious resisters for the cloud in almost every company. You need to bring together key stakeholders in the same room to discuss cloud adoption — addressing the issues head-on and clearing any fear, uncertainty or doubt.

Cloud is no small investment, and it only makes sense to include different participants that will be directly or indirectly impacted by the shift.  

Some of essential roles who should be invited for discussion are: C-suite group such as CTO, CIO and CIO; application owners including business units and development teams, CISO, SecOps people; Governance, risk and compliance experts; lead architects such as cloud and existing infrastructure leaders; key department heads, networking specialists, data architects, etc.

When key stakeholders attend a discussion on cloud adoption it leads to more alignment and support to major IT initiatives.

Making “Cloud-First” Commitment

“Why are you moving to the cloud?” is probably the most critical question for your agenda. You cannot debate, discuss or create a cloud strategy without understanding proper reasons.

Give complete commitment to the workloads — in short to adopt a cloud-first approach. Cloud-First means that all your applications and data should be moved to the cloud unless there is a valid reason for it to stay on-premise.

It may seem like an aggressive approach. However, it helps in dedicating the appropriate resources to the cloud — fully establishing the organizational change necessary to make a measurable difference, working towards a more strategic direction.

Also, proper funding and dedicated teams that only work on cloud-related activities are important. When an organization truly understands the benefit of cloud, it’s able to develop a long-term strategy for cloud success.

Cloud Business Office

You can leverage the cloud to evolve processes that have not been touched in decades. Developers can create and modify their infrastructure requirements using the software.

Software development depends on the critical nature of your business. The management imposes tight control processes and has to go through long approval cycles. Thus, Cloud Business Office (CBO) work as the central point of decision-making and communication for your cloud program – both internal and external.

CBO is as an operational and governing body that directs and guides all aspects of your cloud program — from the first implementation to ongoing operations.

Also, the cloud requires fewer people to manage and operate. This means a more cohesive team is needed to break down silos. The central set of processes help in combining operations, development, infrastructure, risk, and finance.

Understanding Cloud Economics

One of the best practices for cloud adoption is understanding the economics of cloud adoption.

Over 50% of enterprises do not take the time out to determine the business case for moving to the cloud. An organization can gain valuable insights by building a business case and improving their understanding of cloud economics.

Cloud economics basically fall into two different categories — 

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Along with hard cost savings, TCO is the like-for-like replacement of on-premise services with cloud services. If you’re trying to determine your current costs, we suggest you look at the whole package and not just server-for-server comparisons. Consider hardware and networking costs, downtime costs, upgrade costs, disaster recovery costs, deployment costs, etc.

Agility and Software Cost: Understand the benefits of having a highly flexible and agile infrastructure — is it helping in decreasing the financial impact or provisioning time? While quantifying these intangibles for enterprise is difficult on-premise, you can get solid answers from the cloud.

Track your financial KPIs with the cloud and build a better cloud program. Your cloud model gets better over time as you add more and more use cases.

Need to leverage more from your cloud in the new year? Get in touch with our team at GRIP I.T.