Tallan’s Cloud Transformation Framework is our proven approach to helping clients evaluate, implement, and adopt cloud technologies to transform their business.  Our framework is centered around helping you create and ultimately implement the necessary business and technology strategies required to successfully utilize cloud technologies for your organization. This three part series will serve as a helpful introduction to the Tallan Digital Accelerator. For more information on our cloud adoption or migration services, connect with Ryan Clark.

Envision

During the envisioning phase, you will work with key stakeholders to understand:

• Key drivers and motivation for cloud adoption
• The desired business outcomes
• Defined business justification from both a cost and operational perspective
• Migration approach

These three pillars are critical to start with as they ultimately build the foundation that begins shaping your cloud strategy as we move through our Framework.

Key Drivers for Cloud Adoption

When it comes to cloud migration, there are multiple drivers in adopting clear strategy.  Every organization is different, meaning all key drivers, strategy, and where they start their journey will ultimately vary.

Some of the most critical business drivers for cloud adoption are:

• Decommissioning data centers
• Merging with or acquiring another company
• The demand to reduce capital expenditure and move to a more operational model
• End of support for business-critical technologies
• A response to regulatory or compliance changes
• Data sovereignty requirements
• A need for reduced time and enhanced IT stability

Desired Business Outcomes

Moving to the cloud is a landmark decision for many organizations and beyond a change in technology, this transition can ultimately pose several changes to your business.  With that in mind, it is essential to identify key business outcomes.

Since the cloud can impact multiple parts of your business, it is important to prepare for conversations across the board and consider groups such as:

• Finance Leadership
• Marketing
• Sales
• Human Resources

Additionally, you will want to consider several different kinds of outcomes around the following topics:

• Fiscal
  • Revenue outcomes
  • Cost outcomes
• Agility
  • Time-to-market outcome
  • Provision time
• Reach
  • Global access
  • Data sovereignty
• Customer engagement
  • Sales cycle time
  • Meeting customer demands quickly
• Performance
  • Reliability
  • Up-time

Business Justification

In justifying a move to the cloud and in order to accelerate your digital transformation, you will want to begin by creating a financial model that aligns with your desired business outcomes for cloud transformation.

When creating your strategy, you will want to consider the following:

• The cloud is not always cheaper.
  • Without a proper governance model, costs can become out of control.
• You do not need to move everything to the cloud.
  • Many organizations are taking a “hybrid” approach to their cloud strategy, meaning it is not necessary to move all your applications and data. For some items it may make sense to keep them on-prem.
• Do not mirror your on-premises environment.
  • You do not need to be provisioned the same way in the cloud, as you are on-prem. Many on-prem businesses over provision to anticipate spikes, but it is possible to spin up resources as needed in the cloud to scale up and scale down at will.
• CapEx vs OpEx
  • You will want to evaluate where Capital and Operational expenditures most positively impact your business.  Most companies that are moving to the cloud are leveraging both expenditure models to their advantage.
• Cloud Migrations are not easy.
  • While there are many benefits you can reap from moving the cloud, the move can be both interminable and costly.  Many organizations take their cloud migration in pieces, which requires high levels of strategic planning.

After considering the above five items, you will have a much better understanding of your approach toward a smooth cloud migration.  From this point, you will want to begin calculating the cost of your migration to evaluate:

• Initial migration cost
• Monthly operating cost
• Any training cost associated with the up-skilling of staff
• An overview of the current annual cost to operate your business on-prem
• A comparison between the current and potential future state you’ve mapped out

Migration Approach

Once the core business drivers, outcomes and justification are identified, there are generally two types of strategies an organization will consider: Lift & Shift vs. Modernize.

Lift & Shift

As you assess a lift & shift strategy, most of the decisions are made purely from an infrastructure perspective and often do not consider innovation of applications.  We see this method frequently with big data center moves and when technologies are coming to end of support.

Normally some of the key motivations behind this strategy are:

• Cost savings (CapEx)
• Reduction in vendor/technical complexity
• Optimization of operations
• An increase in business agility
• Preparing for new technical capabilities
• Scaling to meet geographic and market demands

Modernize

When considering a modernization strategy, these decisions tend to be more focused around innovation and bringing new capabilities, insights, and data to your organization.

Some of the key motivations behind this strategy are:

• Needing to scale quickly
• Building new technical capabilities
• Improving customer experiences and user adoption
• Transforming products and services while enhancing functionality
• Driving deeper insights from application data

Ahead, I’ll be covering the Roadmap and Establish phases of our Digital Accelerator. To learn more about Tallan’s approach to cloud strategy, click here.

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Ryan Clark, Sr. Business Development Manager, Microsoft Technologies

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