Cloud migration and efficiency: How to maximize your ROI

If you want to migrate to the cloud there are several factors determining the success of your migration. One of these success factors is having an expert by your side, someone with specialist knowledge who can oversee the whole process and train your staff. In this article we explain in detail how expert knowledge and training can maximize your cloud migration ROI.

So, you’ve migrated to the cloud (or maybe you’re considering the idea). The journey itself could have been easy or hard, depending on the specialist knowledge available for:

• Translating actual on-premise usage to the cloud
• Predicting capacity requirements and cost models
• Ensuring everybody is aligned and on-board with the migration

Indeed, getting access to this expertise is like having the Head Coach of an NFL team on your side: a person able to consider all options, set-up your different plays, and provide a clear sense of direction.

The need for specialist talent

Even the best Head Coach is only as good as his or her coaching staff: the defensive and offensive coordinators, and coaches for different roles, special teams, strength and conditioning etc. Personnel employed to enhance performance today, while also ensuring a successful tomorrow.

The question is: what does any of this have to do with increasing ROI from a cloud migration?

Well, cloud migration is also a process with distinct phases and ‘game plans’. Equally, success is largely dependent on the skills and competencies at your disposal: the experienced know-how you can call upon.

Focusing on more than just the costs

Nowhere is this more evident than in post-migration, more specifically in the quest to measure cloud ROI (which everybody wants to do, because running services more cheaply is one of the primary reasons behind any cloud initiative!).

The trouble is that calculating Cloud ROI is never easy.  That’s because the migration is intended to transform the business, but such a transformation also makes it difficult to ‘prove’ cost savings – or even what additional costs are now being incurred.

Not that cost is the only factor for measuring cloud adoption success. In a recent IBM survey, other top KPIs being used by businesses included:

• Increase in provisioning speed
• Speed of multi-sourcing
• Quality of perceived user experience
• Service-oriented architecture (SOA) reusability
• Elastic scaling cost improvements
• Level of automation

All of which calls for a number of specialist coaches to help with both getting these areas right in the first place, and in calculating their contribution to the overall ROI figure.

Speed to benefit

Arguably the most important resource of all is training.

Training (be it internal or external) drives optimal use of the cloud and takes the conversation beyond ROI and towards the other key variable: time.

This is the time between implementation and the realization of benefits. And, as every coach appreciates, the quicker he/she can get pupils to understand new plays, the quicker they’ll be able to put them to good use.

Practical outputs

Training, in cloud migration terms, is about minimizing your migration effort and creating efficiencies, streamlined processes, and operational change. It’s also an organization-wide affair when you consider that (according to a recent survey) only 27% of ‘IT and business decision makers’ are satisfied with their cloud migration experience.

In other words it’s about focusing on a number of specific, practical outcomes:

• Increasing the speed and rate of change – helping the business adopt the new services being made available, and to transition to new capabilities as soon as possible.
• Understanding the process for rapid provisioning – and identifying the best way to scale up and down as requirements evolve.
• Inspiring more dynamic usage – and realizing the full benefits of matching the exact operational needs of the users, and then continually fine-tuning in line with demand.

And then turning that attention inwards to deliver specific operational changes that:

• Help IT re-shape their roles and responsibilities, and shifting output away from daily maintenance to development and data analysis
• Enable the function to develop common systems standards and practices to be followed by IT, developers, and engineers – thereby ensuring consistency in the cloud strategy
• Address the skills gaps that any cloud migration highlights, and whether your organization has the necessary cloud architects and engineers or needs to up-skill/bring in new talent