As for most things in business, your approach to taking to the cloud must be well-planned, strategic, and set right with overall business strategy. When done right, the cloud presents significant cost-savings. It also streamlines your business processes, reduces administrative costs, and frees up capital and IT manpower to help redirect focus to other important areas of your business. The key, however, is to do it right. Here’s how to chart out a strategic path for your cloud implementation:
Get the nod from everyone who matters
Medium and large business are complex in structure and company formation. There could be more than a single stakeholder in matters pertaining decision-making. Get the nod for cloud computing or moving parts of your business to the cloud. If getting the “yes” from them isn’t possible, you could at least get a cross-section of stakeholders to get the signoff on cloud computing decisions related to cloud computing implementation, cloud strategy, cloud solutions, and IT fulfillment.
Start with low risk processes
The most critical business processes go to the cloud last. Start with trying to move least important, uncritical, and simpler business processes to the cloud first. If the processes are critical or if they are complex in nature, moving them to the cloud pose risks, disrupt business, and could even prove to derail your profits. The path for cloud adoption should always be simple to complex. Period.
Focus on cloud adoption and training
Moving to the cloud is one thing; getting everyone involved with cloud-based applications or solutions is quite something else. Make sure that the end users are always familiar with the cloud applications you consider. If it’s a new application, focus on training users to make the best of the cloud implementation. This ensures maximization of cloud adoption success. Further, most cloud solution vendors always add new features, fix bugs, and provide updates – that calls for hawk’s eye on these changes and to go with the flow.
Keep eyes peeled for the devil in the details
As far as cloud solutions and services are concerned, you’ll invariably work with vendors and cloud service providers. Make sure you read through the contracts, apprise yourself on the terms and conditions; get into intricate detail on SLAs, service levels, and security standards. You could opt to use professional legal and IT help to make sure you understand licensing agreements, resolve issue, and handle other such non-technical aspects of moving to the cloud.
How has the move to the cloud been? If you are just considering moving to the cloud, please do talk to us or avail our consulting services to avoid expensive mistakes and get a better insight on cloud strategy.
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