Running a enterprise with out some cloud help is a rarity lately. Still, when formulating a cloud technique, firms appear to make some widespread errors. Here are a number of of them.
Making Your Cloud Strategy an IT-Only Strategy
Gartner, at its IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference this week, famous {that a} profitable cloud technique wants help from IT outsiders.
“Business and IT leaders should avoid the mistake of devising an IT-centric strategy and then trying to ‘sell it’ to the rest of the business,” Gartner Vice President Analyst Marco Meinardi stated in an announcement. “Business and IT should be equal partners in the definition of the cloud strategy.”
“Technology for technology’s sake is generally not a good idea,” added Gartner Vice President Analyst David Smith.
“Whenever you do something, you want a clear line of sight back to why you’re doing it, what’s the business reason,” Smith advised TechNewsWorld.
“People look at it and say, ‘It’s technology. Let the technologists deal with it,’” he continued. “What happens then is that people focus on the adoption phase — which is about how you do things and when — which is different from the strategy part, which focuses on what you’re doing and why.”
Shirking an Exit Strategy
Organizations regularly don’t have an exit technique from a cloud supplier as a result of they don’t envision leaving the cloud. In addition, formulating such a method could be tough. “People don’t like the answers they’re going to get, so they avoid it,” noticed Smith.
During the early days of the cloud, vendor lock-in was a big worry, however that’s much less the case in the present day, famous Tracy Woo, an analyst with Forrester, a nationwide market analysis firm headquartered in Cambridge, Mass.
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“Some companies will choose to be locked in with a specific vendor to get to market sooner or take advantage of specific pricing or services,” Woo advised TechNewsWorld.
Nevertheless, she added, “Organizations should always be thinking about a plan B regardless of whether that is cloud or some other alternative.”
“That being said,” she continued, “it’s rare to hear about companies that actually do exit from a specific cloud provider completely.”
Confusing a Cloud Strategy Plan With a Cloud Implementation Plan
Organizations ought to at all times create cloud technique plans earlier than implementation or adoption. The strategic plan is made throughout a choice section during which enterprise and IT leaders resolve the position cloud computing will play within the group. A cloud implementation plan comes subsequent, placing the cloud technique into impact.
“If you call something a strategy, and it’s really an adoption plan, you end up with hundreds of pages of detail that are not of interest to the business people, so you scare them off,” Smith defined.
“A good cloud strategy should be a short and consumable document, consisting of 10 to 20 pages or slides,” added Meinardi.
Some areas usually ignored in a cloud technique plan recognized by Woo embrace key objectives, meant income targets, new income streams, and new enterprise or traction that the group desires to create utilizing the cloud.
“Too often, companies get into a rush adopting cloud and only think about the implementation aspect without thinking about the higher target or larger strategy at hand,” she stated.
Equating a Cloud Strategy To Migrating Everything to the Cloud
Meinardi defined that many enterprise and IT leaders will balk at formulating a cloud technique as a result of it means they’ll be compelled to make use of cloud computing for every little thing. “Organizations should keep an open mind and partner with a non-cloud technology expert, such as an enterprise architect, who can bring a broad viewpoint in the definition of your cloud strategy,” he suggested.
On the opposite hand, some organizations imagine transferring to the cloud is an easy process.
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“One of the biggest challenges that companies have is that they think they can take what they’re running on-prem and just move it to the cloud,” famous Jack E. Gold, founder and principal analyst at J.Gold Associates, an IT advisory firm Northborough, Mass.
“To get the best benefit from a cloud implementation, you need to rethink your applications, solutions, architecture, and strategy,” Gold advised TechNewsWorld.
“They also don’t do a great job deciding which apps should remain on-prem and which should go to a cloud environment,” he added.
“There are lots of apps that will never move to the cloud,” he continued. “They’ve been running for 10 years. They’re going to be running for another 10 years. Why bother?”
Outsourcing Development of Your Cloud Strategy
As enticing as passing the buck for making a cloud technique to another person could also be to some enterprise and IT leaders, Gartner doesn’t advocate it. It is just too necessary to outsource, it stated.
“It makes sense to outsource during the adoption phase where you might need outside expertise,” Smith famous. “What happens, though, is it’s very easy to put yourself in a position where you’re allowing your vendors to define your strategy.”
“If you want to go out and get help from someone who knows what they’re doing, that’s fine, but you need to oversee what they’re doing,” Gold added. “You don’t want to just throw a check over the wall. You need to be involved in understanding your strategy, even if someone else is helping you put it together.”
Woo agreed. “I wouldn’t say it’s a bad idea to outsource strategy unless all of the strategy is being outsourced with absolutely no direction from the company itself,” she stated. “That’s actually a big portion of what major Global System Integrators do when they help with designing and implementing a cloud strategy.”
Equating a Cloud Strategy With ‘Cloud First’
Gartner defined {that a} “cloud first” method implies that when somebody desires to construct or place a brand new asset, the general public cloud is the default place for them to try this.
“But cloud-first doesn’t mean cloud only,” Meinardi maintained. “If business and IT leaders adopt a cloud-first principle, their strategy should work out the exceptions to the default choice that will make applications elsewhere other than in the cloud.”
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Woo famous that some belongings finest positioned exterior the cloud are knowledge with heavy residency necessities (knowledge can’t depart a particular area or nation), knowledge that must be bodily near the place it’s processed for latency or efficiency causes, and knowledge the place egress is just too pricey, equivalent to in massive knowledge functions and AI.
Believing It’s Too Late To Devise a Cloud Strategy
Gartner contends it’s by no means too late to plan a cloud technique. “If organizations drive cloud adoption without a strategy, this will ultimately cause resistance from individuals who are not aligned on the strategy’s key drivers and principles,” Meinardi stated. “As a result, this resistance will slow down cloud adoption and potentially jeopardize the entire cloud project.”