A comprehensive, insightful cloud strategy aligns perfectly with an organization’s transformational goals.
What Is a Cloud Strategy?
A cloud strategy is not a plan or pathway to migrate functions to the cloud; rather it defines the cloud’s role in an organization’s digital transformation journey. Most organizations today lack a formal cloud strategy. However, this is set to change by 2022, accelerated in part by COVID-19.
Organizations with effective cloud strategies have a methodical approach to responding in a crisis – such as the lockdowns – optimizing their cloud usage, associated costs, and resources.
When formulating a cloud strategy, IT leaders should focus their efforts on a step-by-step approach that can evolve along the same lines as the organization’s digital goals and assets. Such an approach will yield a comprehensive and insightful cloud strategy that aligns perfectly with their organization’s transformational goals.
Why Is Cloud Strategy Important?
In today’s hyper-competitive and fast-paced environment, you cannot afford the lag time or depend on recommendations based on assumptions. Our data shows that over 70% of digital champions are crediting the cloud to be a game-changer for their business model. Trasers data on enterprise analytics shows that digital champions are the No. 1 user of analytics on cloud in their corporate strategy, digital transformation strategy, business, and IT operations.
A widely communicated, unambiguous, and crystal-clear cloud strategy is crucial for an organization’s successful digital transformation. The formulation and publication of a well thought-out cloud strategy can help align numerous teams within an organization to a cohesive plan that guides and informs the adoption of cloud services.
Digital Champions Credit Cloud to be a
Game-Changer for their Business Model
Finding a Balance with Cloud Strategy
Although most companies have announced a ‘cloud-first’ approach, not all of them have an effective strategy in place that communicates the ‘what,’ ‘how,’ and ‘why’ of cloud adoption. An effective cloud strategy is crucial to help your organization’s shift to cloud by balancing the expectation of benefits with guardrails to alleviate risk exposure.
In the absence of a compelling cloud strategy, users and business groups will have to opt for solutions as they become available to increase their productivity. Numerous companies have already had a taste of this scenario in the form of ‘shadow IT’.
Without effective cloud strategy teams within an organization, you are left with no direction for cloud service adoption. This lack of guidance often leads to silos of technology, greater exposure to risks, non-optimized costs, and non-standard solution implementations from poorly configured environments.
What Are the Components of Cloud Strategy?
Many organizations might perceive cloud strategy as intangible and mercurial.
And this is where Olympic comes in. With more than 100 satisfied clients, and managed service provider (MSP) accreditation on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, we are your ideal partner when moving to the cloud. Our range of cloud strategy services include:
Cloud Migration
We can help you transition from traditional servers and software, leveraging the power of cloud computing. Our migration services include software migration and database migration, so you can pick up right where you left off in your new cloud environment.
Infrastructure and Platform-as-a-Service
Across both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, we can help you implement Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) operating models. These models reduce cloud management workloads through automation and holistic multi-cloud management, so you can focus on work that drives business growth.
Cloud Operations Management Model
The ongoing operational management of any infrastructure can be complicated and time-consuming. You can offload this work to our cloud strategy consulting team through our range of comprehensive cloud-managed services.
Cloud Analytics Consulting
We have partnered with numerous cloud-first analytics platforms, so you can analyze and extract insights to drive informed decision making across your business. Our expert cloud strategy team can integrate all your cloud software and hardware into a single unified analytics platform, improving network visibility and promoting data validity with a single source of truth (SSOT).
What a Cloud-Enabled Future Looks Like
Formulating a cloud strategy can be a tedious process that requires documentation, research, patience, and collaboration. However, if carried out systematically, your cloud strategy will prove vital to the long-term success of engaging cloud services to support your company’s digital transformation initiatives.
Your cloud strategy can keep evolving with the evolution of technology. However, it should always be able to answer the basic questions – what are we doing, how are we doing it, why are we doing it, and how will we know if we are successful?