2. Is your cloud and digital
strategy aligned?
The biggest obstacle for a successful cloud
strategy is to develop it without aligning
with the digital innovation strategy of the
organisation. The organisation’s cloud
platform enables the rest of the digital
experience and digital work processes to
be built upon it. Lack of alignment of the
two strategies in terms of requirements of
scalability, application workloads, reliability
and geographic responsiveness will lead to
the failure of the digital innovation strategy
and lack of any business return from the
cloud roll out strategy.
3. Is business more agile than IT?
Who is driving innovation in the
organisation? If it is the business that is
moving faster than IT, then key business
decision makers need to be involved during
the formulation of the organisational
cloud strategy. By bringing business
decision makers at an early stage into the
development of the cloud strategy, it is
more likely that the investments required
for the cloud roll out can be justified against
the investments required for the digital
business innovation.
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“
LEGACY DATA
NEEDS TO BE
MIGRATED AND
CONFIGURED
ON WHICHEVER
CLOUD PLATFORM
IS SELECTED FOR
IMPLEMENTATION.
4. Plan out your critical and
supporting workloads
A cloud strategy is not meant to be an IT
showcase of sorts. The prime purpose is
business innovation, business agility, and
significant improvement in IT operations
and cost. A cloud strategy that does
not include and plan for business facing
application workloads will have no returns
from business. It may be promptly shelved
as yet another IT operational initiative that
can wait for better times or forwarded to
business pending further discussion on a
rainy and dull day.
5. Cloud implementation is not strategy
A cloud strategy document that takes a
deep dive into the process of technology,
platform and supplier selection is going
down the wrong side of the road. An
implementation document cannot substitute
for a strategic document that describes
the business goals and the longer-term
innovation benefits for the organisation. IT
cannot follow a wild west approach, where
all pending IT objectives and innovation
goals are piggybacked onto the cloud roll
out project. This will lead to huge project and
architecture overruns, associated with capital
debt, and return on investment failures.
6. Internal IT and business audit
Like any IT project initiative, it is necessary
to capture the states of the IT and business
organisation before and after the start of
the roll out. The internal audit should be
able to determine answers to the following
questions from various end-users: what
benefits are you seeking from cloud; why
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