By Stan Roach
Make a list of the top technologies that are driving innovation, fueling revenue generation, boosting product development, and making businesses more competitive and you’ll find cloud computing topping that list. The cloud is the "phrase du jour" and is on the lips of just everybody, right from tech evangelists to business owners and from CIOs to the network guy and everybody else.
Sixty-seven percent of respondents who were a part of the Fourth Annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey said they were planning to move their data to the cloud over the next two years. Transitioning to the cloud is at the top of the minds of most businesses, with the move being seen as integral to business success. The core need of every business is to adopt technology that delivers tremendous business value at reduced operational costs, and so far, it’s only cloud technology that seems to be up to this task.
But, all your expectations will come to naught if you aren’t strategically planning your migration to the cloud. Adopting a best practices approach to migration will help you reap the benefits of the cloud over the long term. An effective and results-oriented cloud migration strategy is a result of asking the right questions that help you take into account the entire business, IT, and service architecture of your organization.
Is Your Business and Its IT Landscape Ready for the Cloud?
Forget the cloud for a second and everything it brings to the table and also the fact that your competitors have taken a portion of their business processing to the cloud.
Look at your business needs in isolation. Once you identify them, think whether they can be satisfied with the cloud.
Now, take a close hard look at your business and find out which business needs can be addressed with the move to the cloud. You are going to implement a new technology and you must know why the cloud and not any other technology.
Other Articles From AllBusiness.com:
- The Complete 35-Step Guide for Entrepreneurs Starting a Business
- 25 Frequently Asked Questions on Starting a Business
- 50 Questions Angel Investors Will Ask Entrepreneurs
- 17 Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs Starting a Business
Don’t move to the cloud because it’s the cool thing to do. Move because it makes sense. For example, if you believe the use of certain customer relationship management tools can be optimized if they are moved to the cloud, do it. If you believe the performance of certain applications and their interoperability with other systems can be maximized with their move to the cloud, no harm in doing it.
Cloud adoption should not be a leap of faith. The benefits of the cloud are very clear and there are businesses that are experiencing them; but knowing why certain businesses' processes need to be moved to the cloud will help you optimize this move.
Do You Have Plans for Your On-Premises Investment?
Have you already deployed on-premise servers? If you have, factoring in the costs of the existing data center investment with the cost of moving to the cloud makes sense. All that support infrastructure that you have assiduously built up, and the licensing costs you’ve paid need to be worked into the costs. When you move a portion of the data on your on-premise server to the cloud means you are abandoning a chunk of your on-premises investment; things get worse if you are planning a wholesale migration of your data, in this case repurposing your investment can become a huge problem.
In case you’ve made a really large investment in server hardware, take a look at your balance sheet, do a cost-to-benefit analysis, identify avenues for repurposing the use of the hardware, and then decide whether the decision to migrate to the cloud, in spite of having server hardware, still makes financial sense.
Server hardware has a certain shelf life, after which its gets obsolete. In such cases, businesses have to implement new hardware. If you can align your migration to the cloud with your hardware life-cycle policy, you will be able to optimize the use of existing resources till they are on the verge of becoming obsolete, and then make the decision to move server data to the cloud.
Are you Prepared To Change the Work Culture of Your Organization?
A move to the cloud is not just a business or technology strategy, but is a massive 
organizational change in itself. It requires a change of perspective, unlearning, relearning, and a change in organizational culture. Thinking of cloud migration purely from a tech perspective might mean various stakeholders will be working at cross purposes.
Moving can be a tectonic business shift and stakeholders must be told why it is happening and how it will change the organization. They must be also apprised of how their roles might change because of the business’s transition to the cloud.
As an example, cloud computing is reshaping the role of the CIO. CIOs no longer have to worry about optimizing the use of technology, maintaining IT infrastructure and all other grunt work that is part and parcel of their job profile. They can become a blend of change agents and revenue generators; they can add more value to an organization by focusing on business analytics and finding out new ways to optimize the use of the cloud for business growth.
How Does One Select the Right Cloud Provider?
If you believe cloud migration is a great idea for your business, you need to choose the right cloud provider. Due diligence is the order of the day, so try looking for outstanding references from people you know. The key characteristics that you must look for are technical competency, experience, customer satisfaction, market leadership, and reputation.
Once you zero in on a list of cloud vendors, make sure to dig deeper about their capabilities. A few considerations to keep in mind include:
- Quality of primary and secondary data centers
- Quality and quantity of their engineering team
- The number of customers already using their services
- The mechanism used to manage updates and patches
- Customer support
- Data safety measures
- Scalability
Auditing the capabilities of a cloud vendor before signing up for a subscription, ensures you choose a vendor that can handle your business's needs.
The whole idea of answering these questions is to help you avoid making a cloud blunder. While a move to the cloud makes terrific business sense, you need to absolutely sure that this move fits your business growth model and your needs in the future.
Don’t have herd mentality when making the decision to move to the cloud. Make sure you've considered any pros and cons before you take the plunge. This will help you leverage the cloud’s potential to its fullest.
