By: Siddharth Purwar, Cloud Consultant

Is your organization following the “Cloud First” strategy? Is your organization ready for retaliation as your competitor is moving to cloud? Are your operational and business stakeholders grasping with “Cloud Fever”? Always remember, “One size does not fit all”. No IT stakeholder wants to embrace the cloud, without feeling confident, that the journey to cloud will be smooth. The environmental factor that everyone is moving to cloud might be a good sound in your ear, but forklifting an application to cloud is not as easy as plucking flower at your backyard could be.

Why enterprises are hesitant about running cloud migration project? It’s not because they don’t want to reap the benefits of cloud, but they are apprehensive about complexity of cloud on-boarding. It is a fear factor that stops many enterprises because they don’t know where to start from. The situation is similar where a naive climber wants to start the mountain climbing journey. Cloud adoption is also like a mountain climbing. For the imperative of mountain climbing success, a trekker needs to go through various activities.

• • Be realistic –

An IT stakeholder needs to analyze his workload whether it is ready to move to cloud? There might be many reasons of failures if you do not do holistic analysis of your workload. A success depends upon realistic analysis and cloud readinesss, before embarking on a cloud journey.

• • Research well –

Are you ready for challenges that lie ahead of you? An IT stakeholder should also know whether targeted cloud is compatible for his workload. What should be the migration roadmap and challenges associated with it?

• • Proper orientation –

Consulting is not a bad idea. Experience always matters. So it is a good idea of what and what not good for you at cloud, while consulting with cloud professionals. This is also a best time to understand the cloud dynamics and leverage the cloud migration experience.

• • Preparation –

An IT stakeholder should know beforehand what should be his deployment topology; what should be right sizing; what should be the migration strategy; and what should be the cloud architecture before running the cloud migration project.

• • Preparing the kit –

Ensure whether you have all the information beforehand. Is your OS compatible to target cloud? If not, what is your strategy? What is your CPU, Memory, Network, Storage, etc. requirement at cloud? What cloud services are you going to utilize?

• • When an emergency hits you –

If you want to taste the success, it is very important to know what all are the risks involved and be ready with mitigation strategies. A risk can be an operational risk, or it can be a business risk which might hamper your cloud journey.

The imperative of successful cloud on-boarding very much depends upon “Cloud Readiness Assessment”. An assessment exercise helps to identify and prioritize the best candidate application workloads for cloud migration. It can also be used to take balanced and informed decision about the most appropriate migration roadmap, and the most appropriate cloud environment for applications.

Preparatory phase of a Cloud Adoption Journey is very important. An IT stakeholder should have a 360-degree view of application workload. All the questions raised above help prepare for smooth cloud journey. In the next article, I will cover how LTI can help you with “Cloud Readiness Assessment Framework” for your cloud migration journey.