Cloud Strategy

What's Cloud Strategy?

Cloud strategy is always confused with Cloud Implementation plan. These are different documents with diff purposes.

The Cloud Strategy is a business document, whereas Implementation Plan is IT document. The implementation plan is an IT document. It primarily talks about the Cloud Adoption, operationalization, methodologies, best practices, Assessments, Tools and steps etc

Key stakeholders: 

CIO, Cloud Architect and the Business Sponsor. 

• CIO: Initiate the cloud Transformation Project, Oversee, Mandate, Set the deliverables, and Set the success metrics.
• Cloud Architect: Project Owner who spearheads the cloud transformation
• Business Sponsor: CIO is not the business sponsor. The business Sponsor facilitates how the business will transform into digital business 

Key Business Drivers: 

1. How the business will transform into digital business.
2. Please note: Its not about Availability, Scalability, Agility, Cost reduction, Improve Productivity

How do we document Cloud Strategy: (5-7 pages)

1. Executive Summary (1-2 pages)
• Vision
• Why the project is important to business
2. Business Drivers (examples like)
• Is the organization leveraging Sensor based
• Are we interested in data ingestion & correlation
3. Cloud Adoption Approach
• Are we going to adopt Cloud First or Cloud Opportunistic
• Multi-cloud?
4. Risks
• Risks important to executives. Put it within context.
• Is the cloud Secure?
• What if the Cloud providers fail?
• What if Cloud Shut us down?
• How do we address the concerns around Cloud Lock-In?
5. Exit Strategy
• How much time do we have to exit
• What are we going to exit? Is it entire cloud provider or only the tier 1 applications?
• Who makes the decision? It should be collection of people (Legal, Procurement, IT, business)
6. Success Metrics for business
• Number of advise generated from the data stream
• Improve the efficiency by integrating the systesms
• Reduce the onboarding time by 15 %

Common Mistakes while building cloud strategy

1. Creating a document that's geared more towards IT than business.
• There are no IT projects. These are business projects and business outcomes
2. Writing a very long document
• Ensure you don't prepare IT specific cloud implementation plan> Remember this is for the Executives. Ensure it's accompanied with Presentation 
3. Not gathering everyone's viewpoints
• Get everyone's buy-in
4. Not appointing the Owner to drive the project
• Its the Cloud Architect 
5. Not having business Sponsor
6. Not having an exit strategy
7. Confusing Cloud Strategy with Implementation Plan
8. Not having Success Metrics
• To track the progress and stay on track 

Source: Elias Khnaser @ pluralsight