Unlocking the Power of Cloud Solutions: Navigating the Digital Transformation Journey
Cloud adoption is on the rise as businesses today face market and supply chain disruptions unlike any they’ve faced in the past and turn to the cloud for the scale, flexibility, and security they need to keep up. As a result, IT is emerging as an important enabler of business success.
As an IT professional, you have the opportunity to grow and leverage your existing skill sets by architecting, migrating, and managing software in the cloud. You can master this shift to the cloud by tapping into a broad range of training, technology, and tools from Microsoft, along with support from us.
Start With a Strategy
The transformation to cloud computing is a great opportunity for IT pros to evolve and meet the changes in the modern workforce, to protect workloads with unmatched security, innovate anywhere with seamless hybrid capabilities, and to migrate to cloud infrastructures that can be trusted to run a business. But digital transformation is not something to jump into blindly. There’s a broad range of business, financial, and technology challenges to consider first. Some questions to ask include:
What benefits (e.g. agility, cost savings, scalability) are we expecting from the cloud and how do we prioritise them?
What is our short-term and long-term roadmap for moving to the cloud?
What is my personal roadmap for building the necessary cloud skills?
Should we seek help from a certified Azure partner?
What servers, applications, and data should stay in the data centre and what should be cloud-based? How can we continue to derive the maximum benefit from existing investments?
How do we want to design future solutions to best leverage the cloud?
Bringing Others Along
Cloud strategy development is an evolutionary process in most enterprises. It requires co-ordination among a variety of stakeholders including IT professionals, developers, compliance experts, procurement, and security. Part of moving to the cloud is understanding the technology, but you also have to consider business and organisational impacts.
Typical stages organisations go through include:
1. Cloud aware – IT staff is aware of broad cloud trends.
2. Cloud experimentation – IT organisation begins to learn about various categories of cloud computing services such as Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service.
3. Opportunistic cloud – IT organisation begins to actively migrate workloads to the cloud to meet new business requirements.
4. Cloud first – Default assumption is that cloud services will fulfill the majority of the computing needs.
Think About Your Own Organisation
Where are you along this evolutionary journey? IT staff members may feel anxious about their roles and positions as they realize that a different set of skills is needed for the support of cloud solutions. But agile employees who explore and learn new cloud technologies need not fear. Current skills are still important as you manage a hybrid cloud environment. By adding new skills to manage computer, storage, and networking in the cloud, IT can lead the adoption of cloud services and help the organisation understand and embrace changes in the industry.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
Our Azure Express Assessment is an invaluable tool offering predictive insights for your cloud migration journey. In collaboration with our colleagues at Microsoft, we’re offering this assessment for free (originally priced at $5k) to a select number of businesses. Don’t miss this free opportunity to gain clarity on your path to the cloud.