I described in my previous blogpost the first seven steps as an approach to evolve from a traditional IT environment towards cloud computing. Let me recap in the list below the first seven steps:

1. Building the inventory of workloads in your current organization
2. Prioritization of the workloads to determine the best candidates for cloud computing
3. Determine the potential destination of the workloads in the cloud
4. Determine the best migration path for each workload
5. Validation of the ability to exploit cloud storage
6. Plan the evolution of your datacenter
7. Select your cloud service provider

You can read the details of the steps in my previous blogposts. Last but not least, let me now take you through the final three steps.

8. Face the challenge of change

Moving your workloads to the cloud is one thing, facing the changes of the own organization is a frequently a serious challenge, played on two levels:

The first level is the changing the organization. For the organization implies moving to cloud a change the way operations are done, the way you are organized. Without such change you can not exploit the full benefits of cloud. Operational tasks such as management of the environment, provisioning, monitoring, and scaling become either obsolete or automated. This and many other things impact drastically the organization, in such a way that the role of the IT organization shifts from ‘operations of IT’ towards ‘manage IT integration’. IT departments gradually become the integration point of IT business services.

The second level is changing the people. Moving to cloud requires new skills and a change in mindset. Adopting new skills can be obtained through training and/or through experience. Changing the mindset is a battle, as people will resist to change, due to three factors:

1. There is a generational difference between those managing IT environment for years and youngsters grown up with cloud services. Those managing the IT environment have gained the experience of years, are familiar with what they do, and avoid changes towards non-proven technologies or non-proven ways of working. Young people are more familiar with cloud, due their consumer experience and less reluctant to adopt cloud. Unfortunately, young people are frequently not at the decision level.
2. People are reluctant to change, as they are moved out of their current comfort zone. Changing to something always new creates discomfort; it is natural that people will try to avoid this. In particular people in day-to-day operations will be impacted, and thus create resistance.
3. Cloud computing is perceived as a buzzword or a temporary hype. It is associated with free consumer services available on the internet. Over the past years have these free services have been in the press with a negative impression, due to security incidents (e.g. stolen credit card data), loss of data (e.g. outages), or fraud (e.g. abuse). Therefore, cloud services are perceived as something of low quality, which are not appropriate for the professional environment. Although, business cloud services are backed by a mutual agreed contract and have a defined service level agreed upon, the perception remains.

The successful implementation of cloud will be dependent on multiple factors. Building the appropriate organization, able to support the cloud and to exploit the cloud capabilities, is a key factor to obtain success.

9. Build the plan

The previous eight steps should enable you to build a roadmap towards cloud computing. Take the different aspects (business, technology, people, ….) together and (1) create a vision where you are heading to, (2) build a stepped roadmap to move from the current situation towards cloud, (3) combine all the obtained insights into a plan.

10. Execute

All done? Great! Do not look backwards during execution of your plan. You have taken the right direction as moving to cloud becomes inevitable. It’s time to execute and GoGoGo! …. good luck and see you ‘in the cloud’!