Digital transformation is at the center of goals and objectives for many enterprises, with cloud migration the vehicle for reaching those goals. Whether it’s improving productivity or bettering the customer experience, there are many reasons to turn to a digital transformation plan to help achieve those objectives.
What enterprise IT must decide is which workloads to move and when. There are basically two mindsets when it comes to cloud migration: a long-term, comprehensive plan, or a series of short-term cloud transitions. Take a look at the differences:
Long-term: Company A has a comprehensive digital transformation strategy that will, after a three-year process, have transitioned 70% of workloads to the cloud. The plan involves evaluating managed services providers, determining network requirements for cloud platforms, new security and disaster recovery policies, and inventorying hundreds of workloads to evaluate their readiness for cloud migration.
At the end of three years, Company A can step back and evaluate the success of their digital transformation, including return on investment as well as customer experience and productivity metrics. Company A may have much to celebrate.
Short-term: Company B also has a comprehensive digital transformation strategy, but the approach is quite different. Rather than a single process, Company B is planning smaller-scale projects that will each take a workload or set of workloads and migrate them to the cloud. For each migration, security and network concerns will be evaluated and addressed as necessary.
Company B will also have moved the bulk of their workloads to the cloud, but they will have been celebrating their successes all along. Rather than waiting three years to determine return on investment and metrics related to customer experience and productivity, they’ll be able to demonstrate a gradual but relatively quick improvement in each of these areas over the three years.
In each of these situations, digital transformation goals have been met. In Company B, those goals have been achieved in small bursts, with the ability to stop and regroup along the way, as well as demonstrate the success of their efforts to leadership, which means better buy-in and access to funding.
As executives, line-of-business managers and other key stakeholders in the enterprise see the impact of cloud migration, momentum for adopting further cloud technologies will build.
To get real answers about the best way to approach a cloud migration, contact us at Truth Comm. We’ll help you determine the right path for your digital transformation, and there will be plenty of celebration along the way.