Thanks to technological evolution, Cloud is now a remarkably familiar word in the world of business. Now more than ever, Cloud adoption is globally increasing at a fast pace and its growth graph is peaking each passing year.
“Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.4% to total $678.8 billion in 2024, up from $563.6 billion in 2023.” – Gartner
With remote and hybrid work models currently taking over the globe, cloud infrastructure has become the spine of every digital business. While businesses continue to optimize their resources for better market control, enterprise-wide cloud migration continues to be augmented by necessity and competition. In a nutshell, Cloud is no more a trend, it is sustenance.
Given the cloud scenario, there still exists some haze around adopting Cloud and taking the most efficient approach. Truth is, the most efficient way to adopt Cloud depends on your business objective, hence it varies from case to case.
This is where SecureKloud’s cloud strategy consulting comes in, where enterprises get a defined and customized strategy roadmap that enables agility and accelerates digital transformation. Be it challenges related to cost savings, scalability, or end-to-end transformation; our cloud strategy partnership ensures that you get your enterprise cloud strategy right from the start. In this blog, let’s understand what are the ‘must have’ essentials that define a good enterprise cloud strategy. But, before we get there…
What is Cloud strategy consulting?
Cloud strategy consulting is a service that helps businesses opt for the right cloud technologies that work together and provides the best return on cloud investment. Cloud strategy consulting or cloud consulting services are usually offered by Cloud service providers in the form of cloud advisory services to help organizations define the best way to achieve their business goals or solve business problems using the right set of Cloud tools and technologies.
How to approach Cloud adoption?
The best way to approach cloud adoption is to take a cloud-first approach, which means considering cloud computing solutions and analyzing the advantages of cloud technologies over other options. While this is known as the cloud-first approach, it is different from the ‘cloud-only’ approach, where every business challenge is expected to be solved by the cloud – which might not always be possible. So, cloud adoption must be approached for solving problems than to stay on trend.
Cloud strategy consulting – getting started!
Before strategizing your cloud plan, it is best to evaluate the factors below:
- Analyze where the market is moving
- Align your cloud goals toward market movement
- Execute the plan for optimum business returns
What should your cloud strategy cover?
The most important thing to remember – Cloud is not a one-stop solution, but a strategy to convert challenges into opportunities. With that mindset, create your cloud strategy including the essentials below:
1. Outline your cloud goals
Gather details on the systems, processes, and technologies currently used in your organization and define your cloud objectives by analyzing your current unmet needs, most affected business units, key stakeholders, and the key enablers for cloud adoption.
2. Assess your IT readiness
Perform a readiness assessment to determine the status of your current IT infrastructure’s ability to accommodate new changes. Make a criteria list to rank your IT readiness and color-code the readiness status. This statement criteria list should assess your current: disaster recovery and business continuity plan, security management practices, internal SLAs (Service Level Agreements), data protection requirements, and identity management processes.
3. Choose the right cloud deployment model
Determine how cloud will be deployed within your organization and select the right cloud deployment model (Public, Private, Hybrid, and Community) based on your business objectives. Since your data and systems will be hosted in the selected cloud model, it is imperative to analyze your computing requirement, networking and storage requirement, and current resources to get the best value out of cloud.
4. Opt for the right cloud computing model
Similar to choosing the best cloud deployment model, it is also important to determine the right cloud computing model that best suits your business goals. There are 3 main cloud computing models namely Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and each model solves specific enterprise cloud challenges.
5. Assess cloud readiness for security and data
Estimate the preparation required to move to cloud, by evaluating two critical factors – security compliance, and data criticality. Security compliance defines your organization’s capability to protect and control access to sensitive data, and the audit mechanisms to ensure continuous legal compliance. Data criticality refers to the ability of your organization to protect confidential data from being tampered with. Both these factors need to be assessed for readiness before cloud migration.
6. Evaluate the value benefits of your cloud migration
Using qualitative and quantitative assessments, estimate the value benefits of adopting cloud such as potential cost savings, improvement in operational efficiency, increase in business agility, and improvement in staff productivity, and measure against your current infrastructure and ROI.
7. Define your cloud target state
A cloud target state is your organization’s intended achievement of cloud goals both physically and virtually, post implementation of your cloud initiatives. To define your cloud target state, create a ‘success metric’ and a corresponding ‘tracking metric’ to measure the implementation success.
To summarize it all, the main goal of cloud strategy should be to remove the constraints of expensive and inefficient legacy infrastructures, and to increase performance, productivity, and business efficiency, enabling business innovation and expansion.
Having a Cloud-first mindset can deliver several benefits, including improved cloud cost management, data security, disaster recovery, continuous cloud monitoring, and more. Migrating to the cloud has become a necessity today due to remote workforce enablement, but the biggest takeaway is cloud’s ability to enable enterprises with much-needed business resiliency.
About SecureKloud
Being a cloud-born company, SecureKloud has been providing Cloud Consulting Services and Cloud Advisory Services, as part of our Cloud Managed Services to global brands, including F500 companies, for more than a decade.
With 400+ cloud projects in our portfolio, championed by 450+ cloud consultants, we have acquired significant knowledge in providing end-to-end cloud managed services for different businesses, including highly regulated industries. Need cloud strategy consulting for your business? Contact our cloud experts today.