Cloud Transformation Journey

The cloud transformation journey is a strategic process through which organizations transition their IT infrastructure, applications, and operations from traditional on-premises systems to cloud-based solutions.

What Is Cloud Transformation? 

A cloud transformation is the process of migrating an organization's IT infrastructure, applications, and data from on-premises systems to cloud-based services.  

This transformation involves leveraging the capabilities of cloud computing, such as scalability, flexibility, and accessibility, to improve operational efficiency, enhance agility, and drive innovation. It often involves a strategic shift in how businesses manage and deploy their technology resources, leading to benefits like cost savings, increased productivity, and improved scalability.  

By both cutting costs and expanding your ability to serve a larger market share, you ultimately boost the bottom line.

Additionally, cloud transformation is typically a crucial component of broader Digital Trasnfomration initiatives, enabling organizations to modernize thier IT operations and better adapt to evolving market demands.

Cloud Tranformation Journey Steps

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1. Application portfolio Assesment

   1. Identify and Document Busines Owner of ech of your application.

   2. Work with Business Owner and conduct application survey to document additional metadata such as version,lifecycle,business unit,vendor, cost,technical fit,functional fit,hosting type,business criticality

   3. Organize these with TIME methodology to find out candidate for migration.

      Tolerate — leave the application in its current state. For example, it may be ending its lifecycle soon, so will need to be replaced and is not worth migrating.

      Invest — the application will need additional budget to get into a fit state for migration

      Migrate — the application is ready for migration

      Eliminate — the application is no longer needed

2. Evaluate Cloud Readiness Assesment

   Key steps in a cloud readiness assessment

   
   

   1. Define objectives and goals

   Clearly define the objectives and goals of your cloud migration initiative. Identify the specific benefits you expect to achieve through cloud adoption, such as cost savings, scalability, or enhanced agility.

   
   

   2. Evaluate infrastructure

   Assess your existing IT infrastructure to determine its readiness for cloud migration. Consider factors such as hardware, networking, storage and virtualisation capabilities. Identify any gaps or limitations that may require remediation or upgrades.

   
   

   3. Assess applications and workloads

   Evaluate your applications and workloads to determine their suitability for the cloud. Consider factors such as architecture, dependencies, performance requirements and data storage needs. Identify applications that are good candidates for migration, as well as those that may require refactoring or rearchitecting.

   
   

   4. Review security and compliance

   Evaluate your security and compliance requirements in the context of the cloud environment. Assess data sensitivity, privacy concerns, industry-specific regulations and compliance frameworks. Identify any additional security measures or controls needed to ensure a secure and compliant cloud migration.

   
   

   5. Analyse performance and scalability

   Assess the organisation's performance and scalability needs. Consider current and future workloads, peak usage periods and anticipated growth. Identify opportunities to improve performance and scalability through cloud adoption, such as leveraging auto-scaling capabilities or cloud-native services.

   
   

   6. Evaluate IT operations and processes

   Assess your IT operations and processes to identify areas that may require adjustments for cloud migration. Consider factors such as provisioning, monitoring, incident management and change management. Identify opportunities for automation, process optimisation and streamlining to align with cloud best practices.

   
   

   7. Consider organisational readiness

   Evaluate your organisation's readiness for cloud adoption. Assess factors such as cultural readiness, employee skills and training needs and change management capabilities. Identify potential challenges and develop a plan to address them effectively.

3. Identify Best Migration Candidate

   Using this information, you can apply the Amazon 6 R Strategies for Migrating Applications to the Cloud (essentially, a more detailed version of TIME) to decide on actions for each application:

   Rehost — 'lift and shift' to a new service or licensing model

   Replatform —  change specific elements to meet cloud requirements

   Re-architect — rework applications to make them cloud-native

   Replace — switch to a new service and licensing model

   Retain — leave the application in its current state

   Retire — eliminate the application

   Using this methodology you can determine exactly which applications you will migrate and which you won't. You can then map out a priority matrix for cloud transformation based on business need and ease of migration.

4. Develop A Migration Roadmap

   The next step in your cloud transformation is to roadmap out the timescales for migration based on your prioritization matrix.

5. Implementation & Governance

6. Deploy, Monitor & Optimize