Moving Your Applications to the Cloud? No Strategy, No Success!

Migrating individual applications to the cloud without a well-defined cloud strategy can lead to numerous challenges and suboptimal outcomes. And although it does take a bit more time to work through your strategy, it’s definitely time well spent. The months (sometimes years) spent rectifying issues due to lack of strategy – not to mention the extra costs – far outweigh the time you’d invest in creating one.

Here's what we typically see when organisations don't have a cloud strategy in place:

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Increased complexity

Application migrations often follow different paths without an overarching cloud strategy, leading to a chaotic and fragmented cloud environment. Managing and maintaining multiple applications in the cloud, each with its own configuration and setup is challenging, to say the least.

Lift-and-shift pitfalls

It's a natural thought that a lift-and-shift migration will be the simplest and least disruptive way to go. Sometimes it is, but without considering other options, opportunities for significantly improved efficiencies and cost optimisation could be missed.

Motivations not considered

There are various reasons for migrating to the cloud, all of which drive your business transformation. Without consideration of your motivations, you're more likely to make decisions that negatively impact the chances of success and overlook areas that can diminish ROI.

Security and compliance risks

Poor security is also something we frequently encounter. Assessing your security and compliance requirements is essential to the cloud migration process. Without it, you risk overlooking critical security issues like access management, encryption and monitoring.

Missed opportunities to save money

Part of your strategy should involve investigating how to optimise costs when moving to the cloud. Without a strategy to guide this happening, you’ll almost definitely end up paying more than you should.  

Poor scalability/flexibility

Poor planning leads to limited scalability and/or flexibility of your applications once they’re in the cloud. As your business changes, your apps can’t change with you.

Governance challenges

Lack of a solid, coherent strategy makes it much harder to implement governance policies. Without the necessary compliance across your cloud infrastructure, your environment is highly likely to get out of control, and very quickly.

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Conclusion

To avoid these challenges, you need to develop a clear cloud strategy that aligns with your organisation's goals and objectives. Your cloud strategy should address factors like:

• Motivations
• Desired business outcomes
• Cost considerations and optimisations
• Technical considerations, such as scalability and flexibility
• Security and compliance
• Sustainability considerations
• Governance

When your stakeholders have worked through these factors, you’re far more likely to experience a successful and efficient cloud migration. And this goes for any sized business – from SMB to enterprise. Additionally, having cloud experts or consultants like ourselves to guide your migration efforts using a Cloud Adoption Framework is an excellent way to achieve the success you’ve envisioned.

If you’re currently in any stage of moving to the cloud - or thinking about it in the near future - now’s the time to develop your strategy. Our team of cloud specialists have plenty of experience with what to do (and, more importantly, what not to do).

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Further resources:

Checklist guide for accelerating your cloud migration

Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework overview (infographic)