The starting point for any strategic initiative is determining the outcomes your business needs and a clear understanding of the gaps in current competencies, capabilities and culture.
Assessing the maturity of your people, processes and technology across key focus areas can help you:
Level of support and culture needed to adopt technology. Executive sponsorship, commitment, organizational alignment, and strategy for cloud.
The value expected from the transformation, KPIs, level of alignment and achievement of business goals. Initiatives and constraints for cloud adoption.
Processes, polices and ownerships. Data sovereignty and data locality. SLAs/SLOs for service delivery. Integration and alignment between teams.
Infrastructure, data management, platforms, and level of standardization to deliver services. Degree of native cloud services adoption vs. IaaS consumption.
IT roles and responsibilities, tools, vendor-specific products and level of standardization. Approach to enablement of cloud and IT teams.
Strategy for designing, building, updating and maintaining applications in accordance with cloud-native principles. Adoption of CI/CD pipelines.
Identity and access management, devices, users, network and data security controls. Security posture, operating model, and reporting policies.
Create and document a vision for the journey
Agree where to start and what to prioritize
Identify the effort required to analyze competencies
Quantify the expected value
Gain executive and stakeholder buy-in
After you have identified the areas for improvement, assess your current capabilities in each area and identify gaps.
Determine the journey that will help you achieve your business goals. The journey may be:
Capabilities to enable cloud infrastructure and operating model across public, private, and multi-cloud environments; support modern app development and deployment; and enable IT and dev teams to deliver and manage any app on any cloud on any device.
Capabilities that end-user computing and infrastructure teams need to modernize current processes and systems to better support employees across devices regardless of location.
Capabilities to modernize applications and automate the path to production, establish a unified operating model for virtual machines and containers within your private cloud, extend a consistent operating model across clouds, and take full advantage of Kubernetes.
Capabilities to protect workloads with comprehensive disaster recovery and ransomware mitigation solutions including developing a disaster recovery strategy, designing and deploying the target DR site, creating a detailed DR plan, validating failover, detecting and managing configuration drift on an ongoing basis.
Capabilities to activate, integrate and configure a mobility platform across traditional data centers and clouds; create a migration strategy; migrate applications; manage and operate the new environment.
Capabilities to deliver virtual desktops and applications to your employees from anywhere – on-premises or any cloud – private, public or hybrid.
Capabilities to extend your on-premises data center to a public cloud for quick access to additional capacity, on-demand scaling of apps, flexible development and test environments, or rapid regional expansion.
Determine the specific activities needed to deliver the required capabilities.
Create workstreams and timelines aligned with business milestones.
Estimate cost savings, velocity, risk avoidance, revenue increase, social impact, CSAT and ESAT.
After your journey and required capabilities are defined, take advantage of prescriptive guidance and best practices.
Understand what is needed to implement your solution and assess the impact to your organization.
Define the scope and requirements
Migrate workloads, refactoring existing applications or building new applications
Define new roles and skills, automate operational processes, and increase visibility across the environment
Activate, deploy, configure, and integrate the environments
Protect and secure the network, workloads, and data
Measure cost, usage, performance, configuration, security, and availability across all your clouds broken down by business groups, applications, or users.
Evaluate in-band and out-of-band guidelines and guardrails including percent of policies in compliance, time saved as a result of policies, and time to remediate security violations.
Include rightsizing savings, time to perform tasks, effective cost per resource, number of security lapses, and number of assets that do not meet security standards.
Quantify cloud spend as a percentage of revenues, time to bring new services to market, CSAT and ESAT.
