INTELLIGENT DATACENTRES
Six tips to make your cloud
journey successful
Initiating a cloud journey is a complex task and both business and IT need to work
towards success, explains Sachin Bhardwaj at eHosting DataFort.
The cloud journey of an organisation
is ideally built by both IT and business
decision makers. In some ways, the cloud
journey can be more transformative
than an ERP implementation and needs
equal executive management attention
and support. Similar to any complex and
challenging project, it may also demand
expert management.
Some of these concerns can arise if
the organisation is large, complex and
spread across multiple geographies with
different legislation, regulation, and
compliance requirements. Other reasons
can link to a pragmatic understanding of
the organisational culture and anticipate
resistance to change.
In general, here are some of the possible
bottlenecks and triggers that can lead to
failure of a cloud project:
T
oday, cloud is a well-known
buzzword with leading business
executives and business decision
makers. However, initiating an end-to-end
cloud journey for an organisation, as a first
step into digital transformation, is a more
challenging task. An organisation’s cloud
journey involves strong interplay between
heads of business and IT decision makers
as well as senior management.
For business and IT decision makers,
the question is no longer whether to enter
the cloud or not. If an organisation is
serious about competing in tomorrow’s
digital market place, adopting cloud
technologies and cloud platforms is the
best way to move forward. Such cloud
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initiatives bring about an alignment
between business and IT yielding
transformation with enhanced competitive
differentiation, productivity, agility, and
reduction of IT costs.
However, once the cloud decision does
get a green light, the real challenges rear
their heads. Where do you start, which
applications and workloads do you push
first, who are the right vendors, how do
you tackle legacy processes, how do you get
the teams to cooperate, how do you ensure
your management gives you support to
transform. The solution therefore lies in
anticipating and planning for all these
challenges to reduce the complexity of the
cloud journey.
1
Internal support
A cloud initiation project is
transformative and tends to be complex.
Ignoring this possibility in the beginning
may be the single most important reason
leading to inevitable failure down the
line. It is important to set realistic
expectations from the beginning amongst
top executives, business and IT decision
makers, as well as other end-users. It is
imperative that across the course of the
project, these sides support and work for
the project rather than against it. This
may also involve working with external
specialists and suppliers. Any steering
decisions taken during the project are
meant to be with the objective of the best
interests of the organisation.
Issue 05
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS