Cloud will take a large bite out of business budgets in the upcoming years. That’s not suprising: the digital transformation has been gaining momentum during the pandemic. While the economy is recovering and labor shortages are increasing, applications and services need to work more efficiently, decrease costs and improve at the same time. But if you spend more money on cloud solutions, it’s more important than ever to get the most out of it. In order to do this, you need an effective strategy.

Gartner predicts that cloud computing investments will increase by 20 percent by 2022. Only a few more years and organizations will have spent 45 percent of their IT budget on it. [1]An important drive is the need to give employees access to company data anytime and anywhere. While every organization has workloads running in the cloud already, few have a solid cloud strategy in place.

Avoid disappointment

With mounting costs, it is more important than ever to take full advantage of the cloud advantages. A roadmap is needed to ensure that expectations about performance and savings actually prove true. The journey to the cloud often leads to disappointment because there’s too much focus on technology, and important factors are overlooked.

A strategy answers what and why

Keep in mind that a cloud strategy is not the same as a cloud-first principle, a cloud migration plan or an adoption framework. It’s a short, useful document containing the answers to what and why questions, containing principles such as:

• Goal: why are we going to the cloud? To promote collaboration? To increase security? To increase speed and availability?
• Business need: what business priorities should technology support? This does not always require a commercial goal. Many organizations have the desire to go green, which is why 'carbon intelligent' clouds are on the rise.[2]
• Technology challenges: what technical barriers stand in the way of achieving our goals? Think custom software.
• BizTech Goals: What is the desired future state of our business technology? Devising a cloud strategy leads to derived questions, for example about budget and prioritization.

The future is full of IoT and edge computing

If you want to be future ready you should take the following[3] developments in account, as predicted by Gartner:

• a doubling of the number of IOT devices in the period up to 2027;
• continuous hybrid work;
• increasing automation of work processes due to the emergence of edge computing platforms.

Furthermore, a growing number of organizations is opting for the multicloud approach. By putting this in to practice, they combine the best technologies from different providers and minimize the chance of vendor lock-in. Also, using multiple clouds helps meeting compliance requirements, improves availability, and shifts workloads. They can utilize the cheapest version of the cloud at the time, for instance.

Don't forget your exit strategy

There are always reasons to switch to another provider after some time. Consider newer technology, for example, or a more attractive price. If proper agreements haven’t been made, it can become difficult or expensive to say goodbye. So an important tip: don't forget about your exit strategy.

Finally: to increase the chance of success, it is important to involve different departments in the transition before departure.

Conclusion

The right cloud strategy allows you to move step by step towards the best solution. You avoid pitfalls and surprises. Take business needs as a starting point, instead of technology. BPSOLUTIONS has a lot of knowledge about cloud solutions and already helped many organizations to maximize value. As a result, BPSOLUTIONS can help you out with advice and implementation, as well as extensive monitoring and support for the public cloud.

To learn more about building or optimizing your cloud strategy, reach out to:

Mark Jansen
Service Strategy Consultant
+31 30 303 2900

[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-08-02-gartner-says-four-trends-are-shaping-the-future-of-public-cloud

[2]https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-08-02-gartner-says-four-trends-are-shaping-the-future-of-public-cloud

[3]https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-predicts-the-future-of-cloud-and-edge-infrastructure