Running a business without some cloud support is a rarity these days. Still, when formulating a cloud strategy, companies seem to make some common mistakes. Here are several of them.
Making Your Cloud Strategy an IT-Only Strategy
Gartner, at its IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference this week, noted that a successful cloud strategy needs support from IT outsiders.
- Business and IT leaders should avoid the mistake of devising an IT-centric strategy and then trying to sell it to the rest of the business, Gartner Vice President Analyst Marco Meinardi said in a statement. -Business and IT should be equal partners in the definition of the cloud strategy.
- Technology for technologys sake is generally not a good idea, added Gartner Vice President Analyst David Smith.
- Whenever you do something, you want a clear line of sight back to why youre doing it, whats the business reason, Smith told TechNewsWorld.
- People look at it and say, Its technology. Let the technologists deal with it,' he continued. - What happens then is that people focus on the adoption phase which is about how you do things and when which is different from the strategy part, which focuses on what youre doing and why.
Shirking an Exit Strategy
Organizations frequently dont have an exit strategy from a cloud provider because they dont envision leaving the cloud. In addition, formulating such a strategy can be difficult. -People dont like the answers theyre going to get, so they avoid it, observed Smith.
During the early days of the cloud, vendor lock-in was a significant fear, but thats less the case today, noted Tracy Woo, an analyst with Forrester, a national market research company headquartered in Cambridge, Mass.
-Some companies will choose to be locked in with a specific vendor to get to market sooner or take advantage of specific pricing or services, Woo told TechNewsWorld.
Nevertheless, she added, -Organizations should always be thinking about a plan B regardless of whether that is cloud or some other alternative.
-That being said, she continued, -its rare to hear about companies that actually do exit from a specific cloud provider completely.
Confusing a Cloud Strategy Plan With a Cloud Implementation Plan
Organizations should always create cloud strategy plans before implementation or adoption. The strategic plan is made during a decision phase in which business and IT leaders decide the role cloud computing will play in the organization. A cloud implementation plan comes next, putting the cloud strategy into effect.
-If you call something a strategy, and its really an adoption plan, you end up with hundreds of pages of detail that are not of interest to the business people, so you scare them off, Smith explained.
-A good cloud strategy should be a short and consumable document, consisting of 10 to 20 pages or slides, added Meinardi.
Some areas typically overlooked in a cloud strategy plan identified by Woo include key goals, intended revenue targets, new revenue streams, and new business or traction that the organization wants to create using the cloud.
-Too often, companies get into a rush adopting cloud and only think about the implementation aspect without thinking about the higher target or larger strategy at hand, she said.
Equating a Cloud Strategy To Migrating Everything to the Cloud
Meinardi explained that many business and IT leaders will balk at formulating a cloud strategy because it means theyll be forced to use cloud computing for everything. -Organizations should keep an open mind and partner with a non-cloud technology expert, such as an enterprise architect, who can bring a broad viewpoint in the definition of your cloud strategy, he advised.
On the other hand, some organizations believe moving to the cloud is a simple task.
-One of the biggest challenges that companies have is that they think they can take what theyre running on-prem and just move it to the cloud, noted Jack E. Gold, founder and principal analyst at J.Gold Associates, an IT advisory company Northborough, Mass.
-To get the best benefit from a cloud implementation, you need to rethink your applications, solutions, architecture, and strategy, Gold told TechNewsWorld.
-They also dont do a great job deciding which apps should remain on-prem and which should go to a cloud environment, he added.
-There are lots of apps that will never move to the cloud, he continued. -Theyve been running for 10 years. Theyre going to be running for another 10 years. Why bother?
Outsourcing Development of Your Cloud Strategy
As attractive as passing the buck for creating a cloud strategy to someone else may be to some business and IT leaders, Gartner doesnt recommend it. It is too important to outsource, it said.
-It makes sense to outsource during the adoption phase where you might need outside expertise, Smith noted. -What happens, though, is its very easy to put yourself in a position where youre allowing your vendors to define your strategy.
-If you want to go out and get help from someone who knows what theyre doing, thats fine, but you need to oversee what theyre doing, Gold added. -You dont want to just throw a check over the wall. You need to be involved in understanding your strategy, even if someone else is helping you put it together.
Woo agreed. -I wouldnt say its a bad idea to outsource strategy unless all of the strategy is being outsourced with absolutely no direction from the company itself, she said. -Thats actually a big portion of what major Global System Integrators do when they help with designing and implementing a cloud strategy.
Equating a Cloud Strategy With Cloud First
Gartner explained that a -cloud first approach means that when someone wants to build or place a new asset, the public cloud is the default place for them to do that.
-But cloud-first doesnt mean cloud only, Meinardi maintained. -If business and IT leaders adopt a cloud-first principle, their strategy should work out the exceptions to the default choice that will make applications elsewhere other than in the cloud.
Woo noted that some assets best placed outside the cloud are data with heavy residency requirements (data cant leave a specific region or country), data that needs to be physically close to where its processed for latency or performance reasons, and data where egress is too costly, such as in big data applications and AI.
Believing Its Too Late To Devise a Cloud Strategy
Gartner contends its never too late to devise a cloud strategy. -If organizations drive cloud adoption without a strategy, this will ultimately cause resistance from individuals who are not aligned on the strategys key drivers and principles, Meinardi said. -As a result, this resistance will slow down cloud adoption and potentially jeopardize the entire cloud project.
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