Cloud Adoption Strategy: Planning to Production in 90 Days

Businesses invested over $631.9 billion in public cloud services in 2023. Cloud adoption strategy plays a significant role in turning this investment into measurable business outcomes. Market projections show cloud spending will reach $1.806 trillion by 2029.

The cloud adoption experience becomes challenging without a clear implementation strategy. Research shows 89% of worldwide cloud decision-makers have their organizations taking a multicloud approach. Another 73% employ hybrid cloud environments. Understanding application dependencies remains the biggest obstacle among many cloud adoption challenges. Organizations need a well-laid-out cloud adoption roadmap to find and reduce risks, manage costs, and ensure compliance during cloud workload migration.

A proven cloud framework delivers substantial benefits. Sensis’s success story demonstrates this – the company cut IT costs by 50% after cloud migration and freed up 80% more time for product development. A clear cloud adoption plan helps achieve better scalability, data accessibility and new collaboration opportunities. These benefits line up with your organization’s overall business goals.

This piece shows you how to turn your cloud strategy from concept to implementation in 90 days. Your organization can overcome obstacles and tap into the full potential of cloud computing efficiently.

Day 1–15: Define Your Cloud Strategy and Business Goals

The first two weeks of your cloud adoption trip play a significant role in building the right foundation. Your team will create a clear strategic direction that aligns with your organization’s goals during this time. About 91% of small to medium-sized businesses say this step made it easier to meet government compliance requirements.

Clarify your cloud motivations and expected outcomes

Your cloud adoption success starts with understanding your “why.” You need to identify what drives your move to the cloud before you look at technical solutions. Your motivations usually fit into three main categories:

Reduce business risk: Many organizations move to the cloud to improve security, business continuity, infrastructure, and compliance management.

Accelerate innovation: The cloud gives you access to cutting-edge capabilities like AI. It helps develop customer-focused solutions and supports a shared responsibility model. This lets your IT team focus on delivering business value.

Improve agility and efficiency: Organizations can boost profitability through operational efficiencies. The cloud supports rapid prototyping and offers scalability to adapt quickly to business needs.

Here’s how you can clarify your motivations:

1. Talk to stakeholders across departments to gather different views
2. Write down your specific business challenges and cloud solutions
3. Rate your motivations based on urgency and strategic importance

A rushed cloud adoption without proper planning creates unexpected challenges, higher costs, and security risks. Take time to create a clear statement about what you want to accomplish through cloud adoption.

Arrange cloud adoption with business strategy

A cloud strategy goes beyond a technical roadmap. It presents a concise view (usually 10-20 pages) of cloud computing and its role in your organization. Your cloud strategy must connect directly to your broader business goals for maximum effect.

Microsoft suggests starting with “business baselines”—the top-level business strategy and desired outcomes. You can find these baselines in annual reports, senior management communications, and direct talks with business leaders.

Create a cross-functional cloud strategy team next. Business leaders should join this team, not just IT stakeholders. Teams limited to IT often face constraints in achieving success. This team needs to verify and maintain the arrangement between business priorities and cloud adoption work.

These questions can help frame your discussion:

• How will cloud capabilities help achieve specific business outcomes?
• Which cloud model (cloud-first, cloud-only, hybrid) best supports your business needs?
• What principles will guide your cloud decisions (SaaS-first, best-of-breed, multicloud)?

“Cloud-first” doesn’t mean everything moves to the cloud automatically. It means you look at cloud solutions first for new initiatives.

Set measurable success metrics

Clear metrics help determine if your cloud initiative works. “What gets measured gets managed.” Set specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track progress toward your objectives in days 1-15.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) offer an effective framework. This system breaks your mission into actionable steps that create accountability. Follow these guidelines when setting metrics:

• Define KPIs that directly connect to business outcomes: Good KPIs track progress toward business objectives without becoming objectives themselves
• Make metrics specific and measurable: Set clear targets like 95% server utilization or 15% faster application response times
• Check progress often: Look at your strategic metrics at least every quarter
• Stay flexible: Cloud technology changes the landscape fast, so adjust your strategy and measurement approach as needed

The SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) helps establish solid objectives and KPIs. This method ensures your goals can guide decisions and resource allocation.

One KPI rarely tells the whole story. Take system availability as an example – tracking uptime hours alone won’t give you the full picture. Use multiple metrics to get a detailed view of performance.

Your first 15 days should end with a clear cloud strategy document. This document should state your motivations, match business goals, and set specific success metrics to guide the rest of your cloud adoption trip.

Day 16–30: Assess Current Infrastructure and Readiness

Days 16-30 mark a key shift from strategy to action in your cloud adoption process. You’ve defined your business goals, and now it’s time to take stock of your current environment. About 94% of companies worldwide call this step essential when moving to cloud-based infrastructure.

Inventory existing applications and workloads

A detailed inventory forms the foundation of your digital estate planning. This list details all IT assets that support your specific business functions. Your cloud adoption goals determine the scope of this inventory:

• For cloud migration, create a catalog of all virtual machines and servers using automated scanning tools
• For application innovation: Start by mapping customer experience, then align with applications, APIs, and data resources
• For data innovation: Build your inventory around products or services and map market disruption opportunities

Your inventory should include more than just applications:

1. Supporting infrastructure components like databases and message brokers
2. Services that support your workload infrastructure (source repositories, CI/CD tools)
3. Servers (virtual or physical) and runtime environments
4. Physical appliances, including network devices and firewalls

Each item needs technical details such as source code location, deployment methods, network restrictions, IP address requirements, and licensing terms. These details will help you plan migrations later.

Note that your first inventory pass rarely captures everything. The cloud strategy team should work with stakeholders and power users to confirm the inventory. Network and dependency analysis tools can help find assets receiving traffic that haven’t been cataloged yet.

Identify app dependencies and compliance needs

App dependency mapping is the most important part of your assessment phase. Without this knowledge, your cloud migration could face serious performance issues or even application failures.

The process finds and identifies relationships between application components, their dependencies, and the underlying infrastructure. This ensures you know which components need to move together to the cloud. A good example shows what can go wrong: moving an application server to the cloud but leaving its database on-premises can hurt both performance and functionality.

Two main methods exist to map dependencies:

Agentless visualization: This captures TCP connection data without installing agents on servers. It collects information about processes with active connections, applications running these processes, and destination ports.

Agent-based analysis: This needs monitoring agents installed on each server. It gives more detailed information, including source/destination server names, processes, application names, ports, number of connections, latency, and data transfer metrics.

Your compliance requirements need a review in the cloud context. Cloud compliance provides a framework to manage risks linked to data processing and storage in cloud environments. You should review:

• Legal mandates and industry-specific regulations
• Data sensitivity and privacy concerns
• Geographical restrictions on data storage
• Authentication requirements against identity management systems

Good cloud compliance reduces financial penalties and builds trust with customers and stakeholders. It also helps create better governance and resource allocation.

Run a cloud readiness assessment

A cloud readiness assessment helps you review how prepared your organization is to move to the cloud. This detailed evaluation shows your readiness at both the organizational and application levels.

Look at readiness through multiple lenses:

The assessment typically follows this process:

1. Schedule assessment meetings with key stakeholders
2. Conduct interviews with personas for each application suite
3. Gather information using structured questionnaires
4. Analyze findings and determine next steps

Use scoring methods that review both country-level and application-level readiness. Country assessment looks at resources, security, regulations, governance, data, and infrastructure. Application assessment focuses on architecture, general factors, operation optimization, and security.

The assessment produces specific recommendations, including:

• Policy and regulatory gaps that need fixing
• Next steps toward implementation
• Recommended deployment model (private, hybrid, public)
• Applications suitable for cloud migration

Your cloud readiness assessment works as a strategic roadmap through the complexities of cloud adoption strategy. It explains areas that need improvement—whether upgrading network infrastructure, re-architecting applications, or addressing security and compliance issues.

Day 31–45: Build Your Cloud Adoption Plan and Team

Your assessment results from days 16-30 will help you build your team and create your cloud adoption plan. This crucial step turns your strategy into a clear roadmap that guides your organization’s trip to the cloud.

Form a cross-functional cloud strategy team

A successful cloud team needs diverse expertise from across your organization. Studies show that 83% of digitally mature companies use cross-functional teams to accept new ideas. This cooperative approach helps eliminate organizational silos that can block successful cloud adoption.

Your cloud team should include these core roles:

• Cloud Architect – Designs the overall cloud architecture and strategy
• Cloud Engineer – Builds and maintains cloud infrastructure
• Security Specialist – Ensures cloud security and compliance
• Business Leader/Product Owner – Arranges cloud initiatives with business goals
• Financial Analyst – Manages cloud costs and optimization
• Organizational Change Manager – Aids cultural adaptation

Note that your team’s size and structure will depend on your organization. Small companies often have people handling multiple roles, while larger enterprises create more specialized positions. The priority is to make sure stakeholders know their security responsibilities through documented cross-team processes and a shared responsibility model.

Choose between cloud-first, cloud-only, or hybrid models

The right cloud deployment model forms the foundation of your implementation strategy. Each approach offers unique benefits based on your business needs:

Research predicts the hybrid cloud market will grow from $40.80 billion in 2017 to $91.74 billion by 2021. Many organizations find this balanced approach ideal. The percentage of companies using hybrid strategies jumped from 19% to 57% in just one year.

A cloud-first strategy doesn’t mean everything moves to the cloud automatically—you just think about cloud solutions first for new initiatives. Cloud-only approaches work best for very small or new organizations, or often both.

Select your cloud service model: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS

Once you pick your deployment model, you’ll need to choose which service models fit your workloads best. Each model gives you different levels of control and responsibility:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) gives you on-demand infrastructure resources, including compute, storage, and networking. You control the operating systems, middleware, and applications. This model offers maximum flexibility and control, making it perfect for organizations that want to manage their applications fully while avoiding hardware costs.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides both hardware and software resources for application development. Your cloud provider manages the infrastructure while you focus on building applications. PaaS excels especially when you have multiple developers working on the same project.

Software as a Service (SaaS) offers fully managed applications that users access through web browsers without installation. SaaS products handle updates, fixes, and maintenance, making them ideal for startups that want to launch quickly without server management.

Many organizations also explore Containers as a Service (CaaS), which provides resources to develop and deploy containerized applications.

Organizations often use multiple service models based on their specific workload needs.

Day 46–75: Execute Migration and Deployment

Your team is ready, and your plan is set. Days 46-75 mark the crucial phase when plans turn into reality for your cloud migration strategy.

Prioritize workloads for phased migration

Clear prioritization criteria will give a successful cloud migration. Moving everything at once isn’t smart – take it step by step:

1. Pick 2-10 data points from your original assessment to rank your first workloads
2. Start with simple applications that don’t carry much risk (usually those with 0-3 dependencies)
3. Choose applications from teams eager to adoptthe  cloud early

The “Power of 10” method works really well—document your first 10 workloads carefully and keep track of the next 10 high-priority items. This approach helps you stay flexible and adapt to business changes.

Applications that stand alone with few external connections make perfect candidates for your first migration waves. Complex workloads with many interconnections should move later when you’ve planned more carefully.

Set up cloud environments and security controls

Once you’ve ranked your workloads, build your cloud environment with strong security measures:

Security controls protect environments from weak spots and reduce the damage from possible attacks. You should set up these security measures right as you migrate—or even before.

Essential security features to set up:

• Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) to track configurations
• API-level integration with provider security features
• Automated security responses for quick action in cloud environments
• Threat intelligence integration to spot known attack patterns

Note that each cloud provider has different setups and security guidelines. Setting up a separate network for testing helps keep everything secure during the switch.

Test and validate your migration

Migration tests focus on IT tasks more than business testing. Copy your resources and test migrations in separate environments to protect your production workloads.

Your testing needs:

• A separate network that matches your planned migration setup
• Secure network access through a VPN or jump box
• Test-specific authentication methods

Start with a simple test plan that records what works and what fails for key parts like virtual machine deployment, service starts, and website access. Clean up any copied resources after testing to avoid permanent changes to your environment.

FAQs

Q1. What are the key stages in a cloud adoption strategy?

A cloud adoption strategy typically involves four main stages: planning, assessment, migration, and optimization. The planning stage focuses on defining goals and strategy, assessment involves evaluating current infrastructure, migration includes moving workloads to the cloud, and optimization involves continually improving cloud usage and performance.

Q2. How can organizations prioritize workloads for cloud migration?

Organizations should prioritize workloads based on complexity and risk. Start with low-risk, low-complexity applications that have minimal dependencies. It’s recommended to begin with 2-10 applications, thoroughly document the process, and maintain a list of the next highest-priority items. This approach allows for learning and adjustment as you progress.

Q3. What is a cloud-first adoption strategy?

A cloud-first adoption strategy prioritizes cloud-based solutions for new initiatives and projects. It doesn’t mean everything automatically moves to the cloud, but rather that cloud solutions are considered as the default option. This approach aims to leverage the agility, scalability, and innovation potential of cloud technologies.

Q4. How important is security in cloud adoption?

Security is crucial in cloud adoption. Organizations should implement robust security controls from the outset, including Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, API-level integration with provider security features, automated security responses, and threat intelligence integration. It’s essential to adapt security measures to the dynamic nature of cloud environments.

Q5. What types of testing should be performed during cloud migration?

During cloud migration, organizations should conduct several types of tests. These include functional tests to validate requirements, performance tests to measure real-world conditions, integration tests to verify connections between services, and security tests to ensure data protection. Testing should be performed in isolated environments to avoid affecting production workloads.