What are the steps to design a cloud computing strategy?

Here's My Take: Initial assessment phase is not just about understanding where you're at but also about identifying where you want to go and WHY. However, remember it's not all numbers and charts you get from assessment; organizational readiness is equally crucial. I suggest to ask, "Is my team equipped for this transition? Are there any dependencies I should be aware of?" So here’s the deal: You've got to understand your baseline comprehensively. It’s not just about technology; it’s also about your business and organizational mindset. This blend of hard facts and soft factors will serve as the cornerstone of your cloud strategy, guiding you toward decisions that align perfectly with your business objectives.

Below are the steps for designing a robust cloud strategy. - we need to create a vision - Create a Baseline - Strategic Decision - Organization Impact - Financial Impact - Create the Roadmap

My take on this. You need to be extremely critical while you define your motivations and goals to move to the cloud. This cannot just be defined by one function (e.g. Infrastructure function), but rather a collective exercise with representation from the CFO organization, CIO organizations, business and Sustainability team. If you successfully answer this 'WHY' question, then you move to 'HOW'. This is where the assessment of your current technical debt, security risks, skill readiness to adopt the cloud, and existing investments that need to be protected (e.g. Netbook value of H/W) becomes crucial. This would provide you with the baseline of your organization and decide on the right migration approach to the cloud.

Designing a cloud computing strategy starts with assessing your existing IT infrastructure, applications, data, and processes. Identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, along with costs, risks, and performance. Evaluate your readiness and maturity for cloud adoption while determining gaps and dependencies. This assessment provides a clear understanding of your current state and the motivations for change.

Understanding your requirements and essential needs is crucial in establishing your foundation. This is important because it serves as the bedrock for your journey to your desired destination. If your plan is simply, "We need to transition to the cloud in 1 year" without any other supporting measures, you're setting yourself up for potential failure and not fully leveraging the possibilities of a cloud platform. Knowing your "why" will determine if the cloud is the best approach, if a hybrid solution is a better fit, or if avoiding the cloud altogether might suffice. The shift to the cloud is far from a plug-and-play process, it demands thoughtful consideration, multi-year implementation, trial and error, and a culture shift.

I always recommend creating a baseline of your objectives to clearly define what needs to be accomplished. Then, select the cloud services that best align with your specific business cases. To further validate and refine your assumptions, conducting small-scale trials can be invaluable in confirming their feasibility. Whenever a deviation from the plan occurs, it's a signal to reconsider whether it's necessary to adapt the baseline, make corrections, or perhaps set aside the opportunity for a more suitable time. This adaptive and iterative approach can greatly enhance the success of cloud initiatives.

Once you have a clear understanding of your current environment, outline your goals and objectives for leveraging cloud technology. Determine the desired outcomes such as increased agility, cost optimization, improved scalability, or enhanced security. Define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your cloud adoption journey.

You need to design your migration strategy too. Whether it will be lift and shift, refactoring or a combination of both. You need to come up with monitoring metrics and have the dashboards in place to monitor for things like response time, success rate, dropped transactions, error percentage etc. This will help in reviewing the application architecture and making changes in it. Often times, specially for legacy applications, it is not designed to run in cloud and get the best out of it. Such applications must be refactored or rewritten to better adapt to the cloud. Cloud migration does not happen in one go. You must plan for cases where your middleware is locally in you datacenter but the application is running in the cloud.

Decoupling your services is a critical exercise. You make the decision to migrate to the cloud, aiming to leverage the services it offers to reduce OPEX and allocate CAPEX effectively. However, transitioning to the cloud with the sole belief that it will yield immediate cost savings can be a costly misconception, as you may discover down the road. The "lift and shift" approach, which essentially transfers on-premises issues to the cloud, is often inefficient and counterproductive. Take the time to thoroughly analyze each cloud provider and conduct trials to identify services that align with your specific business case. This diligent approach ensures the best long-term solution and helps you avoid falling into the trap of vendor lock-in.

This is really a tricky area and depending on your aspirations, there are few difficult choices to make 1. Choosing a single or multi-cloud provider has its merits and demerits. A multi-cloud setup helps to diversify risk but at the same time, you lose the power in the negotiating table due to reduced volume with each vendor. 2. Protecting existing investments - Finding the right cloud choices which allow you to reuse your existing investments in software and hardware. e.g. SAP ECC licenses to S4 or existing OS licenses on-premise to cloud 3. When to modernize? Before or after movement to the cloud? The answer depends on current infrastructure ageing, the urgency to innovate in your business and the appetite to spend Capex.

Explore different cloud service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and deployment options (public, private, hybrid) based on your requirements and goals. Evaluate major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and their offerings to determine the best fit for your organization. Consider factors like service capabilities, pricing, geographic availability, and vendor lock-in.

While I agree with calculating ROI and TCO, a business case should be much beyond mathematics. The reason for stating this is most organizations struggle to build effective business cases as the whole exercise is quite complex from data collection of current estate to simulating costs for future use. Of course, you should try but put equal focus on other areas. If your organization is building a lot of applications internally rather than buying from the market, it is a no-brainer to think of the cloud as the future. If you buy a lot of software, then a lot depends on the cloud roadmap of those application vendors. Strong cloud champions in leadership are also very important to drive this top-down.

Build a compelling business case that outlines the benefits, costs, and risks associated with migrating to the cloud. Highlight potential cost savings, operational efficiencies, and competitive advantages. Address concerns related to data security, compliance, and governance. Present a clear roadmap for implementation, migration, and ongoing management.

In designing a cloud computing strategy, the fifth step is to communicate and execute the strategy with your stakeholders and teams. Establish a clear and compelling vision and roadmap for cloud adoption aligned with your business strategy and culture. Engage and educate users, customers, partners, and vendors on the benefits and best practices of cloud computing. Implement and execute your cloud solutions and continuously monitor and evaluate results to ensure successful execution and alignment with your overall objectives.

Vision, roadmap, objectives, and a compelling narrative are indispensable for increasing engagement from all participants on this transformative journey. It's unrealistic to expect that merely announcing a move to the cloud will instantly make a company innovative. Like any other transformational change, it's vital to effectively communicate the "why," "when," and "how" in a consistent and sustainable manner. No one appreciates being left in the dark about the direction, and everyone desires the opportunity to voice their opinions and actively participate in this journey. Failing to provide clear communication can lead to assumptions and uncertainty, which can hinder the success of the cloud migration.

Secure buy-in from key stakeholders, including executives, IT teams, and end-users, by effectively communicating the benefits and rationale behind your cloud strategy. Establish a governance framework and allocate resources for implementation. Execute the migration plan in phases, prioritizing workloads based on criticality and complexity. Monitor progress closely and address any challenges or roadblocks promptly.

Continuously evaluate the effectiveness of your cloud strategy against predefined KPIs and business objectives. Solicit feedback from stakeholders and end-users to identify areas for improvement. Stay informed about emerging technologies, market trends, and regulatory changes that may impact your cloud environment. Update your strategy accordingly to adapt to evolving needs and opportunities.

The cloud space is continually evolving, introducing new services, which can make it easy to lose track of things. In such a dynamic environment, it's crucial to consistently refer back to your baseline, your "why," "when," and "how" to ensure you stay on course. Adaptability is essential, but striking the right balance is key. Being too adaptable without a clear sense of direction can leave everyone uncertain about the ultimate destination, especially in a landscape where changes occur without notice or effective communication.

Moving to the cloud is the start of the journey. You need to keep an eye on costs and regularly drive the optimisation exercise. Cost on cloud tends to go up alot if not used correctly. There are lots of optimization possible both from devops and application architecture perspective. Few simple ones are nightly descaling of the services when the traffic is less, shutdown of the non prod environment during weekends, optimizing the DB read and write and selecting the right database.

Change can be challenging, and transitioning to the cloud is no easy feat, particularly when the mindset resembles that of an on-premises data center. The cloud offers the potential for increased adaptability and competitiveness, to achieve this, you must have a strong understanding of cloud technologies, provide training for your engineers, and cultivate a culture that thrives on collaboration and continuous learning. While best practices can serve as a guide, it's important to recognize that each organization may require a tailored approach when designing its cloud computing strategy. It's essential to have a clear understanding of the specific benefits and profits your organization stands to gain from leveraging cloud technology.

I'd like to share some additional insights based on my experience. 1. Purpose: Avoid initiating cloudification simply because others are doing it. The first step should always be absolute clarity on the purpose that is clearly articulated and understood! 2. Micro-modernize: Mega-cloudification plans quite often end up in the dustbin. Instead, consider adopting a broader vision but focus on executing localized micro-modernization. 3. Ownership: Many consulting orgs walk away by providing unviable paper-based plan as they are not the one executing it! Consider E2E ownership. Lastly, Most cloud initiative fails not because of the technology itself but the inability to effectively manage the associated change and align stakeholders!

Getting everyone in the enterprise aligned to the journey can be one of the biggest hurdles to get over. Often the application owners and the infra teams don't see eye to eye, and create divergence in terms of the direction - but the business unit that consumes the services will lose out. The strategy to move to the cloud doesn't have to be wholesale, it needs to be considered against many levers - ROI, certainly - but measured against the business productivity gain vs cost management as well as the difference between old world and new. Devise a roadmap across the business, not just from the technology point of view, but to address the needs and challenges to be agile, next gen tech ready and sustainable.

Always check the Cloud Native Computing Foundation landscape because “CNCF’s mission is to make cloud-native computing ubiquitous…”