What are some pitfalls you can avoid in your cloud adoption journey?
Digital transformation is the evolution of business because it embraces the necessity of change. Cloud adoption is a pivotal and typical step in the digital transformation journey. However, if not implemented correctly, there are many potential pitfalls you can encounter. In a recent webinar with Betty Rhiger, CTO of Microsoft Canada’s One Commercial Partner, she discussed common cloud adoption pitfalls and how to avoid them.
1. Not Defining the Outcome
During the cloud adoption journey, business will sometimes feel like they are not achieving what they wanted. Often, this is because they didn’t clearly define what digital transformation meant for their organization or what specific outcomes they wanted to achieve. These outcomes are not necessarily technology outcomes, but they could include improving speed to market, agility, and employee engagement. Regardless of the outcome you’re after, it is important to define these outcomes from the beginning because it will change the workload, your plan, and what you’re measuring your success against.
2. Not Assessing who is invested
Major roadblocks can be encountered if you don’t have the buy-in from your stakeholders: customers, investors, your team, etc. Who will be impacted and who is invested?
Also to avoid cloud adoption pitfalls, be sure to evaluate your team and see if they have the skills to adopt the cloud. Building a skills readiness plan is also recommended. This helps identify how and which team members should be reskilled or where you want to get the support of a third party.
3. Overlooking the details
Now that you have identified your outcomes and developed a strategy and plan, some businesses forget about the details such as the environment setup, architecture framework, and landing zone. Moving to the cloud can save money if it’s done properly. But, companies make assumptions that overlook these details, and it can end up being costly. Know your details, migrate and modernize properly, and save money.
4. Not Maintaining the Same Quality
Cloud adoption requires adjustments, but don’t sacrifice quality along the way. Regardless of whether you are adapting existing offerings or building new ones, have a plan to ensure you are maintaining the quality of your application or service. To avoid this cloud adoption pitfall, ask yourself: Do you know what the quality was before? How might these changes create a dip in quality and impact your user experience? Making a change for the newest and “coolest” technology won’t work if your users don’t know how to use it.
5. Not Incorporating Governance Early
Governance underpins everything. Controls, compliance, security are all needed in a cloud environment. Even if you are using SaaS, where users are not responsible for hardware or software updates, that doesn’t mean you are handing all support over to the cloud provider. For example, you will have to think about how you will incorporate new releases. What functionality will you use or not use? If data is being pulled out of that app and being used somewhere else, are you still staying compliant? Governance should be in place early and any feedback and learnings should be incorporated into your iterative process.
