Tim: Many of our clients have an excellent cloud strategy, but they’ve communicated it once or twice and declared victory. In reality, that is not how people learn and change. Our successful CIOs have overcommunicated the cloud strategy, so much so that they really get sick of hearing themselves repeat it.
Sook: It is important that, once you have a cloud strategy, you have a road map, and you must communicate the strategy broadly and consistently throughout the organization to drive cloud adoption.
A good communication plan doesn’t just focus on leadership – it extends across the entire organization to help people understand how the migration strategy will affect their day-to-day activities.
Checkpoint #3: Prioritize the journey
With a strategy and communications plan in place, it’s time to prioritize the migration. Identifying which applications, workloads and data to move to the cloud, and which to keep on-prem, is vital to securing early wins that help build momentum.
Sook: Not all applications are suitable for cloud. And even for those applications that are going to cloud, there is not a one-size-fits-all approach. For example, a modern application may require a minor refactor, or a monolithic legacy application will require rearchitecting and sometimes even in-depth code changes before it can run on cloud. In the short run, a migration approach might look like it costs less than a modernization; but, in the long term, modernization allows organizations to harness cloud-native technologies in order to realize the full benefits of going to cloud, like speed, agility and innovation.
Tim: So, the right sort of strategy and road map for most clients is a combination. You’ve got a portfolio of things that require relatively small investment and happen quickly, but gain relatively small returns. And that tends to be toward the migrate end of the spectrum. Then you’ve got other applications that are important to the organization and truly differentiate the enterprise. And that’s where you take the time to rewrite these as cloud native.