Have you Assessed Your Organizations Cloud Readiness? Create a detailed Roadmap today!
There could be multiple objectives for an organization to consider a move to the cloud for eg. Agility, Cost Savings and Flexibility, Continuous Iteration and Innovation, Platform Breadth or others. However, for organizations who are in the process to migrate to the cloud, pre-migration planning can be as critical as the actual implementation itself. That’s why Cloud Readiness Assessment becomes a vital first step before the actual migration to the cloud for any organization. A cloud readiness assessment is a process where you examine your applications and data to determine if they can be moved to the cloud with minimal impact on operational continuity.
A Cloud Readiness Assessment helps any organization to have a clear understanding of what applications can be moved seamlessly what can pose a problem so on and so forth.
Defining Your Cloud Business Objective:
What’s also important is to define your cloud business objective, as it is imperative for any organization to have a clear understanding of why they want to move to the cloud. Not having a clear understanding of your objective may leave you lurching in the dark. So, answer for yourself What is our motivation and reasoning for cloud migration?
The most common business objectives for migrating to the cloud are seen to be:
- Avoiding maintenance costs that come with data centre’s
- Achieving increased scalability
- Improving resiliency with better failover capabilities
- Increasing remote collaboration/Ensuring enterprise mobility
- Staying abreast of the competition
- Meeting customer expectations
There could be any number of reasons your organization may have, so it’s a good idea to list in detail the reasons that apply to your business. Then you can make an assessment if there are enough ticks against the checkboxes to justify a major change such as cloud migration.
Once you have decided to carve your roadmap for the cloud. Cloud Readiness Assessment should be your essential first step toward your Cloud Journey. Multiple companies provide Cloud Assessment Services to help you accelerate your cloud journey. Companies that help clients evaluate the cloud as part of their IT service delivery strategy. Their services enable you to identify which enterprise applications can be moved to the cloud and will also bring to your notice the specific operating models, processes, and technologies required to use the cloud technology for greater value.
However, if you have an in-house team of Cloud SMEs then you can choose to also assess your own cloud readiness. AWS provided online Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART) is a self-guided checklist to gauge your level of preparedness for a smooth transition to the cloud. The tool is now available in English, German, French, French (Canada), Spanish, Italian, Bahasa Indonesian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese.
The AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART) helps organizations of all sizes develop efficient and effective plans for cloud adoption and enterprise cloud migrations. This 16-question online survey and assessment report details your cloud migration readiness across six perspectives including business, people, process, platform, operations, and security. Once you complete a CART survey, you can provide your contact details to download a customized cloud migration assessment that charts your readiness and what you can do to improve it. Your CART report includes a heatmap and radar chart with detailed scoring information and resources to help you improve your readiness score. This take-away report will help you plan and communicate with stakeholders. View a sample CART report now.
If you are interested to learn how does CART work, you can view the demo video here.
A cloud readiness assessment can transform an organization’s rough idea of moving to the cloud into a detailed plan that explains how to make it happen and in what order events should occur. Once you have done your organizations Readiness Assessment for the cloud either in-house or through a vendor, it’s essential to fill the skill and resource gaps immediately. For instance, if you have identified the shortcomings of your IT team’s knowledge base, it will help you to set up a training program to train them or opt for a strategic partner who can help your team with the end-to-end execution of the migration. As the skills and resources are the prerequisites for executing cloud migration, it is ideal to address these gaps before you can take a step forward in your migration process. Some of the other key things, that you would benefit from while creating a detailed roadmap for your cloud migrations are:
- Scrutinize your current IT infrastructure
- Identify your security requirements
- Assess your operational readiness
- Determine the budget
- Establish a cloud operating model
- Prioritize what application to move first
- Test Adequately
While it may be overwhelming to take the first step towards your Cloud Journey, if taken the right first step the overall journey can be a seamless one for your organization. A lot of research and preparedness can help you go a long way before you start your cloud migration.
To conclude, cloud migration is not just a lift and shift operation. It is a challenging task that involves a lot of intricacies. Hence, it is important to evaluate your cloud readiness considering all possible contingencies. Many cloud providers offer tools and services that are designed to help organizations assess their cloud readiness. While the CART can help you assess your own cloud readiness, given the complexity of cloud readiness assessment, some organizations even offload the process to a strategic partner.
At Locuz, our Cloud Readiness Assessment approach includes interactive consultations with stakeholders to determine business practices, goals, and opportunities to arrive at a plan for categorizing Applications to Re-host/Re-platform/Re-factor for the Cloud. As part of an effort towards continuous innovation and to build greater agility and superior compliance in the business, one of our customers wanted to revamp the existing Dev & Test IT Infrastructure. It wanted to do so by evaluating multi-cloud platforms and deploying secure means for developers and users to access the Test & Dev Infra.
As part of this effort, we carried out a comprehensive IT Infra & Cloud Readiness Assessment for them and provided a plan & design(with validated test cases) that can serve as a blueprint for it execute further; both on the cloud as well as on the compliance side. The blueprint also included a comprehensive migration plan of all Dev & Test servers from On-Prem to cloud, ensuring that the network is optimized for superior user experience and deploying security (like DLP) solutions to protect.
Whether you’re attempting to move to the cloud, or you’re already in the cloud, chances are you have got a fair idea about the term ‘cloud governance’. So, what is cloud governance all about, and why does it matter?
Cloud Governance refers to the decision-making processes, criteria, and policies involved in the planning, architecture, acquisition, deployment, operation, and management of Cloud computing capabilities. To put it simply, Cloud Governance is the people, process, and technology associated with your Cloud Infra, Security, & operations.
