Looking to the Sky—Cloud Readiness for the Business of Future

Agility is the core of modern businesses. Rigid legacy systems act as the lead antagonist in embracing agility—pushing back every measure to uplift growth and experience. It’s been long established that Cloud is the way forward, yet IT and organizational complexity makes Cloud adoption anything but simple.

The COVID-19 pandemic has only affirmed that Cloud when done right, yields resilience and agility. The keyword here is ‘right’. Hurrying into the Cloud often leads to expensive flop where the process stays in a tenterhooks situation. Therefore, it is only logical to invest in preparation, as much as the process itself. A comprehensive strategy can help organizations assess inside out and get ready for the big step.

Be it uplifting depressed processes or harnessing Cloud computing for next-generation analytics—assessing Cloud readiness is the primer of the process, irrespective of goals. Also, a relevant point here is—the priming exercise is as fluid as the end-objective, one size doesn’t fit all. Narrow view, hard-lined metrics, and traditional approach defeat the purpose itself.

I am often asked what do we expect with the Cloud readiness assessment? In my experience, assessment must not leave you with mere knowledge of gap—it should tell you where exactly a process is, when, and how it will reach a good state of the Cloud.

• It must nudge wholesome introspection to quantify agility, costs, compliance, operations velocity, and technical dependencies.
• It should be objective enough—translating rough Cloud migration ideas into a comprehensive plan that relates to tangible outcomes.
• It must deliver a compelling value case not just for technology adoption but also for harnessing it for real-world business objectives like ROI.

How do we provision Cloud Readiness Assessment at Damco?

We have an 8-stepped approach to Cloud readiness, leaving no room for guesswork—working up the blueprint from ground zero of transformation. Each of these steps is derived from lessons in the field and industry standards on their own—we have brought them together into a single structure where they radically improve the ROI of Cloud migration.

The complexity and scale of Cloud migration are unique—making evident the value of careful orchestration, creating checkpoints, and a solid user feedback system across IT and the business. We have the experience to stretch and shrink new use cases as they come—based on their business merit. Meaning the focus is on keeping the big undertaking that Cloud migration is rather a painless exercise.

Getting started with Cloud Assessment? These tips can come in handy

Build goals bottom up

Unlike what conventional wisdom states, Cloud goals should not solely come from the executive level—rather they should be a mix of what end users want and what executive stakeholders plan. Start from challenges of frontline operations and most pressing issues; then move to the bigger picture.

Be enough aspirational

Soft targets yield soft success. Unless goals are not hard, the transformation will not be massive. Yet, the keyword here is ‘enough’. A tenured Cloud partner can help you find the sweet spot between ambition and ground reality—with due consideration to finance, user skills, and technology debt.

Measure, don’t guess

To quantify Cloud success, stakeholders should have a clear picture of their metrics in the current scenario. The more granular, the better. To get this level of insight, business and Cloud partners need to tie targets to specific tasks and succinctly chalk out the points and magnitude of value addition.

Take Away

Cloud Readiness Assessment is like a guardrail framework to prevent scope creep, keep informed every stakeholder with the next steps, and delve deeper for worthy goals. Clients generally find greater success when all the steps are attributed to a business outcome, where both parties can see where they need more effort.