As cloud technology evolves, it’s important to bring the customer along the cloud journey to ensure seamless adoption. There can’t be a mismatch between the goals of the business, company culture, crucial pain points, and IT department. So, how can you continue helping your customers innovate while staying true to your cloud journey?

Provide a Clear Understanding of Cloud Migration Benefits

Many businesses and leaders are jumping to adopt the cloud, with 30% of all IT budgets dedicated to cloud computing. As you, your organization and clients dive into the cloud journey, it’s important to consider the reasons that inspire most businesses to choose to migrate.

These are what will outline the end goal (or goals) for moving toward the cloud in the first place. Having the right alignment can ensure a clearer destination in your cloud journey and a better understanding of how to get there.

For most, cloud migration is driven by the need to cut technological costs, but that is only a part of the story. Be sure to highlight the additional benefits cloud migration can help ease aside from finances to your customers. For example, customer retention and onboarding can be eased through cloud technology, it can eliminate redundant technology at scale and increase efficiency, and more.

Have a dynamic discussion with your customers that asks the right questions, so you can determine which other benefits would align with your customers’ goals and how you can help them innovate as cloud technology evolves.

Conversations like these ensure that clients understand the bigger picture and understand how the cloud journey will benefit their business, not just your organization.

Also read: 5 Emerging Cloud Computing Trends for 2022

Be Realistic About Cloud Migration and Its Pitfalls

A major part of the cloud journey involves being realistic about your capabilities. As companies start on their cloud journey, they aren’t always honest with themselves, which can lead to slower results than previously anticipated and ultimately lead to friction with customers.

Think about the maturity of your company, and be honest about what you can and can’t do. This is crucial for determining whether your customers’ goals are feasible with where you want your cloud journey to take you.

There are so many paths to cloud adoption that the sheer number of options can be overwhelming, especially when analyzing what a perfect cloud implementation could look like. It is important to be realistic about how much change your organization can withstand at once and to try and keep your program simple, since it’s tempting to try to incorporate every cloud service and modernization tool all at once.

Instead, you should plan for these improvements incrementally over time and with the benefit of hindsight. By phasing in change and modernization over time, you have the ability to learn what is the right cloud program to generate the most value for your business, the market and your customers.

This reflection can better prepare you for some of the most common challenges cloud professionals face when moving to the cloud, including time and money, capability gaps, and building alignment. Thinking about the challenges can also ensure that your journey not only works well with customers but also with your people, organization, compliance, and more.

This conversation also ensures that customers feel like you are communicating thoroughly as you both go along this journey. Opening up about challenges allows for transparency and can educate customers on the ins and outs of the cloud and have them thinking through the constraints they may have in their own cloud migration.

Also read: Cloud Security Best Practices for 2022

Frameworks Can Help You Prep Ahead

For your migration to stay on track and meet the needs of both you and your customers, there needs to be a framework that highlights the guiding principles for how the system should be in place. Make sure to account for things like clearly defined thresholds in line with the customer’s cost model, clear expectations for compliance, and more.

Most importantly, a framework also needs to account for revision cycles. Remember, many customers won’t understand the technical aspects of cloud migration. Part of having them along for your journey stems from anticipating their needs.

You can and should educate them as much as possible, but at the end of the day, they will be more focused on the outcome. This means that if revisions take time or don’t go well, they can derail the entire migration process, costing time and money.

A framework also goes hand-in-hand with understanding your limitations and anticipating obstacles. Through a framework you can continue to communicate with customers throughout your cloud journey in an informed way, sharing where you are in the process and how this progress can impact their business needs.

Migrating to the cloud is an important step in any business. By engaging with your customers from day one, you will gain a better understanding of the destination, acknowledge the challenges, and establish a framework. In turn, you will not only innovate but will also account for your customers’ goals every step of the way.

Read next: The ABCs of Smart Cloud Migration

The post Why Cloud Integration Starts With Your Customers appeared first on IT Business Edge.

Each of these repatriations of applications from cloud back to on-prem infrastructure represents wasted time and resources. Why are some organizations able to generate value from the cloud and others not? How can you ensure that your migration will go smoothly and you will realize the business gains you expect from the cloud? In an area where the pace of innovation is matched only by the speed at which new jargon is created, it can be difficult to know where to start. After all, what exactly makes a cloud migration ‘smart’? 

Though the answer isn’t quite as simple as ABC, it’s a good place to start.  

A is for Automation 

IT decision makers planning a cloud migration often think they have two options:  

1. Move quickly: saving time and money in the short-term, but sacrificing precision and not taking advantage of the strategic benefits cloud can provide. 
2. Undertake a painstaking planning and development process: guaranteeing better outcomes, but requiring significant time and resources.  

But, there’s a third route available that offers the best of both worlds with the help of automation and AI. AI-based cloud migration applications can map thousands of customer data points and correlate them to an optimum migration pattern in minutes. What’s more, AI uses historical data to inform its conclusions, so it gets smarter with each migration, and lacks the same inherent biases as human teams, so can help to maintain objectivity and consistency in decision making.  

Pre-migration, automation can help you discover ‘unknown unknowns’, including: 

• Understanding app dependencies 
• Assessing technical feasibility 
• Weighing up on-premises vs. cloud costs 

Post-migration, automation can help by monitoring your cloud estate in real-time and providing intelligent modernization recommendations. Having completed a cloud migration, too many organizations adopt a ‘set it and forget it’ mentality. This leads to resource mismanagement and over-provisioning—ultimately resulting in poor performance, unnecessary spend, and security vulnerabilities. 

Also read: Successful Cloud Migration with Automated Discovery Tools

B is for Business Empowerment 

Let’s zoom out a bit. It’s now well understood that a cloud migration isn’t purely a technical project, but a business enablement initiative. In a recent survey of US businesses undertaking a large-scale cloud migration, 80% of respondents cited improving business agility and 71% cited reducing time to market as their key motivators. 

A smart migration should start by identifying the strategic benefits cloud can bring to your business. Perhaps your organization wants to start experimenting with machine learning capabilities like image recognition or voice analysis? All three of the major cloud providers have created general-purpose services to support this, which don’t require in-depth data science skills.  

Or maybe you want to build data-driven decision making into each stage of your value chain? The cloud offers greater data visibility, enabling you to more quickly make the right decisions.  

Once you’ve decided what you want to achieve, true cloud transformation depends on putting a comprehensive migration plan in place—one that takes your goals into account. This should include: 

• A migration strategy for each application. 
• A definition of the amount of change you’ll make to each application as it’s migrated. 
• How rapidly you can move applications through the migration process. 

Failure to do this can slow down your migration, cause you to miss dependencies, and lead to outages. Automation can help here, too—enabling you to effortlessly fly through painstaking mapping work that would otherwise take weeks.  

Also read: Creating a Cloud Migration Checklist

C is for Communication  

A successful cloud migration depends on effective communication and mutually understood goals. A clear migration communication strategy will ensure your entire organization is aligned and provide the right information to the right people:  

• C-suite: If they’re not directly involved, senior leaders need succinct information around costs, benefits, and expectations as well as a clear picture of what a successful migration would look like. 
• Management: While requiring less strategic information than the C-Suite, managers need to understand the details about how this change will affect their departments and the services they provide. 
• End users: A cloud migration is a significant cultural change. End users need to know when changes are taking place, how they will be affected, and who to turn to with any questions or issues.  

Cast your mind back five years, and organizations would typically start their cloud transformation project by building a landing zone. They’d then do a lighthouse application migration, start application assessments and continue in this vein. Only much further down the road would IT decision-makers think about a cloud education program.  

Nowadays, forward-thinking organizations are turning this timeline on their head—focusing on education and communication before starting the build process. Let’s take the example of one financial services organization recently supported by Cloudreach. The organization began its cloud transformation initiative with a cloud fluency program for 50 to 60 product leaders and C-Suite executives. Through a mixture of formal education and informal brainstorming sessions, it was able to uncover some unexpected strategic benefits of cloud—and engage decision-makers from all verticals. 

Of course, these are just three factors to consider when starting your smart cloud transformation—and they all depend on having the right team of experts in place to execute the project. Given the complex considerations involved in most cloud migrations, we could probably cover the whole alphabet and beyond!

Read next: Best Cloud Migration Vendors & Services 

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