Mistakes Not To Make When Thinking About A Cloud Strategy

There is little doubt when thinking about the potential of the cloud for the company. The cloud brings many benefits and allows companies to be much more efficient, resilient and competitive. Reduce costs and improve efficiency, while helping to be much more agile in responding to market challenges.

However, to achieve all these benefits, cloud adoption must be done in the best way possible. The strategy must be solid, well thought out, and very aware of what the company needs and how the cloud will help them achieve it. Unfortunately for corporate competitiveness, this is not always the case. Mistakes in the jump to the cloud are something that hinders the digital transformation and must be avoided . They are also somewhat easy to prevent if you know what to look out for.

The Gartner consulting firm has just identified which are the most common errors . Some key questions can be learned from his lessons about what the cloud strategy should be like and where companies fail —and shouldn’t— when they make the leap to the cloud.

Face it as just an IT issue . One of the starting mistakes of companies is assuming that the cloud is something that matters only to the technology department. “Cloud computing is not just technology ,” recalls the analysis. For this reason, you cannot decide everything from IT —and orient the entire strategy to your needs and interests— without counting on others. A good cloud strategy takes into account the capabilities and needs of all the company’s departments.

Assume that you are late . It is never too late to define the cloud strategy and to do things well. That is, if the company understands that it is doing things wrong, it can always use that knowledge to modify them and improve its positions. Continuing to bet on a certain inertia will only complicate things . “If organizations launch cloud adoption without a strategy, it will end up causing resistance among those who are not aligned with the key principles and drivers,” recalls Marco Meinardi, Gartner vice president, analyst.

Thinking that the strategy is the same as the implementation . Another big mistake in the cloud strategy is to confuse phases, mixing concepts and needs. One thing is the cloud strategy, which sets the objectives that are expected to be achieved with the cloud and what benefits it will bring to the company, and quite another is the implementation, which are the steps that will be taken to bring the cloud to the company. Both must be worked on in a differentiated manner and with different priorities.

Likewise, the consultancy alerts, a cloud strategy does not go through simply assuming that everything will move to the cloud and that it will be used for everything. You need to think carefully about what is needed and why.

Design the strategy with basic errors . Here the list of key points that Gartner points out is extensive. There is not having an exit strategy in mind, key when you want to change provider or cloud support; confusing having a strategy for the cloud with one that manages the data centers, since everything here will depend on the needs of the company; or simply doing cloud outsourcing without really thinking about what is being done and why, since priorities are not established with it. On this last point, a good partner helps and guides to know what is outsourced and what are the reasons for it.

The need for a reliable partner

In the end, and in short, many of these errors are avoided by having two fundamental realities as a starting point. The first is to assume leadership in IT from the company itself that is very aware of the great changes in the market, but also of its own needs.

Also Read: Five Misconceptions About Cloud Deployment