Developing a Cloud Adoption Strategy

The value of technology in businesses and organisations cannot be underestimated, and there was nothing like the COVID-19 pandemic for us to see its value first-hand. 

Overnight, the way we interact with and operate businesses was forcefully changed forever, effectively accelerating our journey towards digitally transforming our organisations. According to a 2020 McKinsey report, companies were able to adopt digital changes 20-25 times faster than they would have anticipated.

Moving forward into a post-pandemic era, digital transformation continues to play an important role in helping businesses grow and thrive. As per the International Data Corporation (IDC), global spending and investment in digital transformation will be valued at $1.8 trillion in 2022. 

With the digital economy booming and creating new opportunities for economic growth, it’s important that organisations know which technologies are worth investing in. 

One of the technologies being picked up and invested in by businesses as they go along their digital transformation is cloud computing. Cloud computing refers to several technologies in a multi-cloud reality that delivers on-demand computing services over the internet.  

In a 2021/2022 digital transformation and cloud survey by international law firm Baker Mckenzie, cloud computing takes the top spot (85%) among the digital transformation technologies that organisations consider a priority investment area. 

According to Deloitte Consulting Managing Director Mike Kavis, the cloud allows organisations to become more agile and deliver software at an incredible speed, and lets them focus on specific requirements rather than the business process. 

“The value in the cloud is when you start moving up the stack. You use databases as servers. Now all of a sudden you have a fully managed database that auto-scales process zones and regions. I don’t have to worry about scaling and managing these third-party solutions. The value is going up that food chain,” he tells us in an episode of Coding Over Cocktails. 

Starting Your Cloud Adoption Strategy

With cloud no longer being an option in order for organisations to move forward, Kavis says it’s important that everyone inside the organisation understand the approach they’re taking towards adopting it.

“You see it so often. You see these companies going back to the data centre. But it’s not because the cloud isn’t any good. It’s because of their approach to the cloud and that created a lot of failures,” he says.

One of the barriers to cloud adoption, according to Kavis, is having “old thinking” about what it actually is.

“A lot of people think of the cloud as someone else’s data centre. Anytime you hear someone say ‘the cloud is someone else’s data centre,’ they’re on the path to failure. That means you’re going to treat the cloud like a data centre when the cloud is much more than that,” Kavis tells us.

Breaking down the long-existing processes inside an organisation in order to build new agile processes could also be a problem.  

While there are a lot of methodologies that can be used to analyse processes and figure out where the waste is and remove it, Kavis says that it’s the silos and “politics” involved that could make cloud adoption difficult.

“It’s easy to recommend methodologies to identify waste and redesign it. But it’s hard to break down the political barriers and change the mindset of the wise,” he says.

Kavis suggests that organisations start by breaking the barriers between teams and taking a more collaborative and engaging approach towards meeting a shared goal, and adopting a focused and product-oriented mindset.

“We’re building software entirely different than we had before. It doesn’t make sense to put teams of domain experts, server teams, storage teams, or network teams because all of this stuff is an API away now. What we need is brains from the storage people, network people to sit in a room with us and help architect virtual private clouds and figure out what’s the right storage unit,” he explains.

According to Kavis, there are definitely long-term benefits for organisations when the right cloud adoption strategy is in place.

“The companies that have been in the cloud for years and have gotten pretty good at this, they’re starting to move up that stack. They’re not thinking about infrastructure anymore. They’re thinking about data, they’re thinking about, ‘How can we not write code? How can I get to market faster by writing the least amount of code possible?’”

So is it really possible to not write millions of code in a day when you’re in the cloud? And what is the magic bullet to creating the perfect cloud adoption strategy? Find out in this episode of Coding Over Cocktails.