Steps in Cloud Adaption at Large Enterprises

Large enterprises have bigger challenges when it comes to migrating applications to cloud. Migration to cloud is often an evolutionary process in most large enterprises and is often a 4 step process - but not necessarily a sequential process, and can happen in sequence or on parallel.

Moving to cloud requires a complete buy-in from all business & IT teams: developers, compliance experts, procurement, and security.

The first step is all about becoming aware of cloud technologies and its implications. IT team will need to understand:

1. What are benefits - Agility, cost savings, scalability, etc.
2. What is the roadmap for moving to the cloud?
3. What skills each team member will need?
4. How does the legacy applications work in the future?
5. Who are the partners in this journey?

The second step is all about experimentation and learning from those small experiments. These are typically PoC projects which demonstrates the capability & benefits. The PoC projects are needed to get key stake holder buy-in.

Third step is essentially a migration of existing apps to cloud. For example moving emails to cloud or moving office apps to  Offce365 cloud etc. These projects are becoming a norm for large enterprises - which have a rich legacy.

Fourth step demonstrates  the final maturity of cloud. In this stage, companies now deploy all new apps on cloud and these are cloud only apps.