Cloud-native transformation is no longer something that can be placed on the “back burner;” it has become a strategic imperative to remain competitive in most markets. According to Gartner, more than half of enterprise IT spending in 2023 will go to cloud services. Drawn by the need for savings, increased flexibility, and the ability to scale at speed, more and more enterprises are shifting key infrastructure to the cloud.

The potential for all these benefits is real. One recent piece of research found enterprises saving an average of 15% on their IT costs by migrating services to the cloud. But it’s a mistake to think that cost reduction is the only, or even the primary, reason to migrate to the cloud. Cloud migration is merely the critical first step on the journey to realize the full benefits of cloud-native transformation.

Although related, migration and transformation are different disciplines. Migration refers to moving from local servers to the cloud. Cloud transformation encompasses modernizing and optimizing the organization’s data, analytics and security to align with the company’s digital objectives.

Without the right strategy, the right mix of technology and the right approach to migration, you’re unlikely to achieve the maximum benefits from your cloud migration. You may cut costs, but your business won’t benefit from the full transformational potential of the cloud, including lowering the risk and time involved in deploying innovative services or improving developer velocity to seize a competitive advantage.

Here are 7 steps BHT Solutions recommends to any company that wants to maximize the return on its cloud investment:

Determine business objectives :

Transformation can only yield maximum value if it aligns with business needs (discovery exercises, stakeholder consultations etc.). Working with stakeholders from across the organization, understand your company’s goals: where it wants to be, now and in the future.

Create a cloud strategy:

The cloud strategy must start from and align with the business’s needs and objectives. Your strategy should address business objectives and should rest on a solid fundamental understanding of the company’s needs, capabilities and key timelines.

Choose the right mix of technologies:

Choose the solutions that will deliver long-term value, scalability and flexibility. Too often, those in charge of cloud migration let the tech lead the strategy. This is precisely the wrong approach. Your strategic business goals should determine the choice of technologies, platform and provider.

Build the right team:

Find the people with the skills, the experience and the qualifications you need to deliver your vision for cloud transformation. Decide which roles you can fill in-house, which require the up skilling of existing staff, which need new hires and which should be outsourced.

Optimize your processes :

Don’t migrate inefficient processes or applications that aren’t cloud-efficient. Optimize first. Work with process and cloud experts to optimize and, where possible, automate key workflows to take the best advantage of the efficiency and cost effectiveness of cloud technologies.

Migrate:

Your experts should be able to migrate your workloads to the cloud in a way that minimizes downtime and achieves the fastest possible transition. By finding dependencies, vulnerabilities and business-critical areas of infrastructure, the right cloud experts will migrate you with minimum downtime.

Optimize:

Continually test, track, experiment and optimize to ensure costs go down while you also achieve your business objectives. With the right approach and the right expertise, your cloud costs should fall over time, as your cloud team continually optimizes and refines your tech stack and your admin strategy.

BHT Solutions, has developed this approach – part of its Cloud Adoption Framework – as a result of years of collaboration at a business and technical level with all three major public cloud providers: AWS, Google and Microsoft.

The BHT Solutions approach elevates cloud migration beyond the basic “migrate, switch on and forget” approach many companies are taking in their rush to the cloud. It is specifically designed to ensure BHT Solutions clients get the biggest possible return on their cloud investment and the greatest transformational boost for their business operations.

BHT Solutions is the world’s leading independent multi-cloud services company, specializing in cloud application development and cloud migration. We have the experts, the tools and the technology required to transform and accelerate your business processes using the latest cloud technologies.

Get in touch today to discuss your cloud transformation.