Cloud Strategies: How To Build a Cloud Strategy for Success

A cloud strategy is where organizations to outline how they intend to use cloud services to achieve business objectives.

A well-defined cloud strategy helps businesses maximize the benefits of cloud computing — such as cost efficiency, scalability, and agility — while minimizing potential risks. It ensures that the migration to cloud services aligns with:

• Overall goals
• Compliance requirements
• Operational needs

A cloud strategy also aids in making informed decisions about which cloud services and deployment models (public, private, or hybrid) are best suited to the organization’s specific requirements.

However, implementing a cloud strategy is not without its challenges.  Organizations often struggle with optimizing cloud usage to balance performance needs and cost efficiency, from security and compliance to migrating sensitive data and applications to managing costs. Careful planning, monitoring, and optimization are essential for effective strategy.

If you’re looking to implement an effective cloud strategy or curious about what makes some cloud adoptions succeed while others fail, read on to learn the basics.

Assessing your organization’s readiness

Before creating an effective strategy, assess your organization’s readiness to adopt the cloud.

Assessing cloud readiness is a multifaceted process that helps organizations evaluate their preparedness for migrating to the cloud. This assessment involves:

1. Analyzing the current IT infrastructure.
2. Aligning business goals and objectives with cloud capabilities.
3. Assessing internal skills alongside the need for external expertise.

Understand current IT infrastructure

The assessment needs to include a thorough analysis of your organization’s current IT infrastructure. This includes understanding the existing hardware, software, and network resources and how they are managed. Catalog physical and virtual servers, storage solutions, and networking setups to identify dependencies and potential bottlenecks.

This analysis helps identify which assets can be moved to the cloud and which may require re-architecting or updating to be cloud compatible. It also aids in:

• Determining the type of cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) that might be most beneficial.
• Finding potential migration challenges, such as legacy applications that are not readily compatible with cloud environments.

Map business goals to cloud services

Strategic business goals and objectives should drive your cloud adoption to ensure it delivers optimal value. Your organization needs to articulate its business strategy and how your cloud technologies will support these goals. This might include objectives such as:

• Increasing operational efficiency.
• Enhancing flexibility and scalability to meet customer demands.
• Innovating products and services.

By aligning cloud adoption with business objectives, you can prioritize migration activities, choose suitable cloud models and services, and set clear metrics for success. This step ensures that the cloud strategy directly contributes to your organization’s overall strategic direction and desired outcomes.

Assessing employee skillsets

A critical aspect of cloud readiness assessment is understanding the organization’s internal capabilities and identifying gaps that external expertise might need to fill. This involves evaluating the skills and knowledge of current IT staff regarding cloud technologies, including:

• Architecture
• Security
• Management
• Compliance

If your existing team lacks experience in these areas, your organization may consider training programs to upskill employees or hiring new staff with the required expertise.

Plus, organizations often benefit from partnering with cloud services providers (CSPs) or consulting firms specializing in cloud migration. These partners offer valuable insights into best practices, common pitfalls, and strategies for successful cloud adoption.

By systematically analyzing these three critical areas, your organization can develop a clear understanding of its readiness to adopt cloud computing. This assessment helps identify the steps needed to prepare for a successful cloud migration, including:

• Upgrading infrastructure
• Strategic planning to align with business goals
• Enhancing internal capabilities or seeking external expertise

(Related reading: cloud certifications to earn.)

How to develop or update a cloud strategy

Developing your cloud strategy is crucial for ensuring that the transition to the cloud supports your organization’s overall business goals, addresses compliance and security requirements, and remains cost-effective.

Here’s how your organization can address these key areas:

Identify business drivers & objectives

The first step in developing your strategy is identifying the business drivers and objectives that the cloud can support. It is about understanding two things:

• Why your organization needs to move to the cloud.
• What it hopes to achieve through this transition.

This process involves aligning cloud adoption with a broader business strategy and identifying specific goals such as increasing agility , enhancing innovation, improving operational efficiency, or reducing costs.

Identifying business drivers and objectives for cloud adoption is a strategic process that requires thoughtful consideration of how the cloud can support and enhance broader goals. Here’s a structured approach you might take to identify these drivers and objectives:

Conduct stakeholder interviews and workshops. Engage with stakeholders across your organization, including leadership, IT, finance, operations, and other relevant departments, to gather insights into their challenges, needs, and goals.

Workshops and interviews can surface valuable perspectives on how cloud adoption could address specific business challenges or opportunities.

Review strategic business plans. Examine long-term strategic plans to understand your organization’s direction and priorities. This review can help align cloud adoption strategies with overarching business goals, such as:

• Entering new markets.
• Improving customer experience.
• Innovating product offerings.

Analyze competitive landscape. Look at how competitors and industry leaders are using cloud technologies. Understanding their approach can help identify strategic opportunities for cloud adoption to gain competitive advantages, such as improving agility, cost savings, or leveraging advanced cloud-based analytics and AI capabilities.

(Related reading: cloud analytics & CloudOps.)

Identify operational inefficiencies. Assess current operational challenges and inefficiencies within your organization. Cloud solutions can streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve flexibility and scalability. Identifying these operational pain points can guide the focus on cloud adoption.

Evaluate trends and innovations. Consider how emerging technology trends and innovations could impact the organization. Cloud computing can be a catalyst for adopting technologies like AI, machine learning (ML), Internet of Things (IoT), and big data analytics, driving transformation and innovation.

(Related reading: cloud cost trends, internet trends & cybersecurity trends.)

Define specific business outcomes. Based on the insights gathered, define specific, measurable business outcomes that cloud adoption should achieve. These could include accelerating time-to-market for new products, improving cost efficiency, enhancing data security and compliance, or enabling remote workforces.

Prioritize objectives & align with cloud capabilities. Prioritize the identified business objectives based on their impact and feasibility. Then, map these objectives to specific cloud capabilities (such as scalability, flexibility, or cost savings) to understand how the cloud helps achieve these goals.

Develop a roadmap. Create a strategic roadmap outlining how the organization will use cloud technologies to meet its business objectives. This roadmap should include:

• Timelines
• Key milestones
• Metrics for measuring success

By systematically identifying business drivers and objectives, organizations can ensure their cloud strategy is closely aligned with their strategic goals, making cloud adoption a deliberate move towards enhancing their competitive edge, operational efficiency, and innovation capacity.

Consider governance & compliance requirements

Governance in cloud computing involves setting policies for cloud usage, ensuring that these policies are followed, and managing access to cloud resources. Some of the policies include:

• Data security and privacy
• CSP evaluation and selection
• Identity and access management (IAM)
• Cloud resource provisioning and decommissioning
• Cost management and optimization
• Data backup and disaster recovery

Regulatory compliance considerations entail understanding and adhering to regulatory requirements that affect how data is stored, processed, and protected in the cloud.

Organizations must ensure that cloud strategy includes a framework for governance that aligns with their risk management objectives and compliance with all relevant laws and regulations. This involves selecting cloud providers and architecture models that meet these requirements and implementing controls to manage data sovereignty, privacy laws, and industry-specific regulations.

(Related reading: third-party risk management.)

Know your security & privacy considerations

Security and privacy are paramount in the cloud and involve protecting data, applications, and infrastructure from threats.

A cloud strategy must address these considerations by outlining how the organization will protect sensitive information and ensure data integrity and confidentiality. Here’s how your organization can structure its approach to these challenges:

• Implement robust data encryption.
• Define access control policies.
• Ensure data integrity.
• Adopt a zero-trust security model.
• Use data loss prevention (DLP) tools.
• Develop and test incident assessments and audits.
• Foster a culture of security awareness.

By integrating these strategies into their cloud strategy, organizations create a comprehensive framework that safeguards sensitive information, ensures data integrity, and meets privacy requirements. This proactive approach to security and privacy protects your assets and builds trust with customers and stakeholders.

Cost management and optimization

One of the appealing aspects of cloud computing is its potential for cost savings and operational efficiency. However, without proper management, cloud costs can spiral unexpectedly.

Cloud spend is a major concern for organizations: one recent study found that 82% of decision-makers said it was their top issue. Developing a cloud strategy should include a plan for monitoring, managing, and optimizing cloud expenses.

Effective cost management requires a strategic approach that combines technical tools, financial governance, and operational best practices. Here’s how to enhance cost management and optimization efforts:

Cost governance framework. Develop a governance model that defines policies, roles, and responsibilities for cloud cost management. This framework should include procedures for budgeting, forecasting, and approving cloud expenditures to ensure accountability and prevent budget overruns.

Tagging and resource management policies. Resource tagging assigns metadata to cloud resources, making it easier to track usage and costs by department, project, or application. This enables more accurate billing and helps identify cost-saving opportunities by showing exactly where and how resources are consumed.

Cloud cost management tools. Leverage built-in tools provided by CSPs (such as AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management + Billing, or Google Cloud’s Cost Management tools) and third-party solutions to monitor, analyze, and optimize cloud spending. These tools offer detailed reports and insights into usage patterns, inefficiencies, and opportunities for cost reduction.

Reserved instances or savings plans. Consider purchasing reserved instances or committing to a savings plan for workloads with predictable usage patterns. These options offer significant discounts compared to on-demand pricing in exchange for committing to a certain usage level over a specified term.

Rightsize resources. Regularly review and adjust the size and capacity of your cloud resources to match your actual needs. Oversized instances, unused storage, and idle resources quickly inflate costs. Rightsizing involves scaling down or terminating resources that are not fully utilized, ensuring that you pay only for what you need.

Automate to optimize. Implement automation to start, stop, or scale resources based on demand. Use auto-scaling features to dynamically adjust the number of active instances, ensuring that performance needs are met without overprovisioning. Automation also helps turn off non-essential instances during off-peak hours, reducing costs.

(Related reading: RPA robotic process automation.)

Data transfer costs. Data transfer costs are an often overlooked aspect of cloud spending. Optimize data transfer costs by selecting suitable storage and transfer methods, using caching, and keeping data transfers within the same region or network when possible.

Continuously optimize. Cost optimization is an ongoing process. Continuously monitor performance and costs and adjust strategies as your organization’s needs and the cloud services landscape evolve.

These strategies ensure that your organization can benefit from cloud investments while controlling expenditures.

Developing strategies for security, efficiency & innovation

A comprehensive cloud strategy is essential to leverage cloud computing to drive business growth, enhance operational efficiency, and foster innovation. Organizations can navigate the complexities of cloud computing to achieve optimal outcomes by meticulously assessing organizational readiness and aligning cloud adoption with business objectives.

Addressing critical aspects such as governance, security, privacy, and cost management ensures that the move to the cloud supports strategic goals, adheres to regulatory requirements, and remains financially sustainable.

As cloud technologies evolve, organizations need to remain agile and continuously re-evaluate their cloud strategy to adapt to new opportunities and challenges. Ultimately, a well-crafted cloud strategy empowers organizations to capitalize on the transformative potential of cloud computing, paving the way for future innovation and sustained success.