What are the Cloud Adoption Motivations?

 

"Why are we moving to the cloud?" This is a common question for both businesses and technical stakeholders. If the answer is, "Our board (or CIO, or C-level executives) told us to move to the cloud," then it may be more difficult for those businesses to achieve their expected outcomes.

This article discusses some of the motivations behind cloud migration, that can help produce more successful business outcomes. Understanding these motivations will help you create a conversation about the available options and, ultimately, create positive business outcomes.

Motivations

Business transformations that are supported by cloud adoption can be driven by various motivations. It's likely that several motivations apply at the same time. The goal of this list, in the following table, is to help generate ideas about which motivations are relevant. From there, you can evaluate and assess the potential impacts of the applicable motivations. Your cloud adoption team should meet with the stakeholders, both executives and business leaders, and discuss which of the following motivations can help your businesses' cloud adoption.

Critical business events	Migration	Innovation
Datacenter exit	Cost savings	Preparation for new technical capabilities
Merger, acquisition, or divestiture	Reduction in vendor or technical complexity	Building new technical capabilities
Reduction in capital expenses	Optimization of internal operations	Scaling to meet market demands
End of support for mission-critical technologies	Increase in business agility	Scaling to meet geographic demands
Response to regulatory compliance changes	Preparation for new technical capabilities	Improved customer experiences and engagements
New data sovereignty requirements	Scaling to meet market demands	Transformation of products or services
Reduction of disruptions and improvement of IT stability	Scaling to meet geographic demands	Market disruption with new products or services
Reduce carbon footprint	Integration of a complex IT portfolio	Democratization and/or self-service environments

Classify your motivations

Your motivations for cloud adoption will likely fall into multiple categories. As you're building the list of motivations, trends will likely emerge. Motivations tend to be associated more with one classification than with others. Use the predominant classification to help guide the development of your cloud adoption strategy.

When a response to critical business events is the highest priority, it's important to get started with migration early, often in parallel with strategy and planning efforts. Taking this approach requires a growth mindset and a willingness to iteratively improve processes, based on direct lessons learned.

When migration is the highest priority, strategy and planning will play a vital role early in the process. We recommend that you implement the first workload in parallel with planning efforts, to help the team understand and anticipate any learning curves that are associated with cloud adoption.

When innovation is the highest priority, strategy and planning require more investments early in the process. This ensures balance in the portfolio, and wise alignment of the investments made during cloud adoption. For more information and guidance, see Understand the innovation journey.

To ensure better decision-making, all participants in the migration process should have a clear awareness of their motivations. The following section outlines how customers can guide and affect decisions, through consistent and strategic methodologies.

Motivation-driven strategies and business outcomes

This section highlights the migration and innovation motivations and their corresponding strategies.

Migration

The migration motivations listed near the top of the motivations table, are the most common reasons for adopting the cloud, but not necessarily the most significant. These outcomes are important to achieve, but they're most effectively used to transition to other, more useful worldviews. This important first step to cloud adoption is often called a cloud migration. The Migrate methodology in the Cloud Adoption Framework outlines the strategy for executing a cloud migration.

Some motivations align well with a migration strategy. Motivations at the top of this list can have less business impact than the ones towards the bottom. Strategies with migration driving motivations have helped organizations to successfully create business outcomes that:

• Increase cost savings. Read the customer story.
• Reduce vendor or technical complexity.
• Optimize internal operations.
• Increase business agility. Read the customer story.
• Prepare for new technical capabilities.
• Scale to market demand.
• Scale to geographic demand. Read the customer story.

Innovation

Data is the new commodity, and modern applications are the supply chain driving that data into various experiences. In today's business market, it's hard to find a transformative product or service that isn't built on top of data, insights, and customer experiences. The Innovate methodology in the Cloud Adoption Framework includes motivations aligned to a technology strategy that appear lower in the Innovation column of the motivation list above.

The motivations below help IT organizations to focus more on innovation than a migration strategy. Strategies with innovation driving motivations have helped organizations to successfully create business outcomes that:

• Increase business agility.
• Prepare for new technical capabilities.
• Build new technical capabilities. Read the customer story.
• Scale to market demand.
• Scale to geographic demand.
• Improve customer experience and engagement. Read the customer story.
• Transform products or services.