Where are you on your cloud journey? It’s a question that solicits a range of answers.
At a recent CBR Dining Club event – in association with New Signature – IT, business and data leaders were polled to see where they were on the implementation journey. To borrow the categories Microsoft applies to Azure cloud adoption, attendees were asked whether they were at the ‘enable’ stage (yet to start), the ‘migrate’ stage (a few early workloads in the cloud), or the ‘innovate’ stage (a more sophisticated implementation). The majority of attendees fell into the middle category.
Sean Morris, Strategic & Advisory Services Lead, New Signature picked up the conversation by offering advice on how to approach each stage.
Drawing on the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure, he said those at the enable stage should first spend time understanding business motivations: what problems is the organisation seeking to solve?
Two factors are key to subsequent success, Morris said. The first is buy-in. Whoever is leading the cloud project must get a senior decision maker on side in order to propel the project forward. The second is economics. If there is a solid business case, most of the technical challenges “fall away” or, at least, become manageable.
For those at the migrate stage, exploration is key. Most organisations are likely to start their cloud experience with a low-risk workload. Some potential issues may be forecast prior to implementation but, invariably, other issues only appear post-migration. Continuous learning is essential to long-term success. For those at the innovate stage, it is a question of working out how to embrace the wealth of features, functions methodologies cloud affords.
During the discussion that followed, attendees wanted to better understand the security and privacy implications of cloud adoption; how to manage identity registers across on-premise and cloud; how to manage downtime in mission critical scenarios; and how to approach the upskilling and reskilling of teams accustomed to managing physical infrastructure.
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‘How to get the most out of the cloud’, a CBR Dining Club event in association with New Signature, took place on Thursday 14 November at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House, London
