Planning your digital transformation journey

According to Gartner, digital transformation represents the changes associated with the application of digital technology in all aspects of human society.

In other words, it's a journey that can take many forms, and while migrating to the cloud may be at its center, there are several steps along your path to success. These include:

Continuously improving the customer experience

Streamlining business processes and increasing agility at scale

Enabling new business models with transformative technologies

The cloud migration journey

Migrating to the public cloud is a journey, not a destination. It’s also not one migration, but often a series of smaller migrations that result in a comprehensive cloud adoption strategy and plan. Although many organizations are well into their multi-year migration journeys at this point, some are just starting out. Here, we’ll focus on how you can get started on your cloud migration journey.

The first step as an organization planning digital transformation and cloud adoption is to ask a pertinent question: “What do we want to achieve?”

In order to build your cloud strategy, you must be clear about the business outcomes you want it to drive. Beginning with an outcome-based approach allows you to look beyond the infrastructure elements of IT and helps ensure your organization is on track with its digital transformation efforts. Asking yourself what you want to achieve will lead naturally into the next step.

Is public cloud the right choice?

Before making a choice, you’ll want to consider your business needs. Think about your business objectives and how public cloud can help you achieve them. Make sure you understand the cost factors that will determine whether public cloud is more affordable for your organization in the long run.

Once you have all that information, it’s time to make an informed choice about which option is best for your organization: public cloud or private cloud. So, to answer the question: is public cloud the right choice – yes, it is. Especially if you are just beginning your digital transformation journey and want to build an infrastructure quickly and cost-effectively to support deeper digitization initiatives.

Here are some of the most common reasons why you should move to the public cloud, and fast:

You want to get started with digital transformation quickly and cost-effectively

Your business can benefit from bottom-line benefits the public cloud offers that are not possible with on-premise infrastructure, such as reduced costs, unlimited storage, flexibility and other services through a pay-as-you-go model

How do you get started?

Start with a pilot project. As you begin your journey to the public cloud, consider starting with a "greenfield" application — i.e., an application that's being built from scratch. This allows you to take advantage of cloud-native approaches, including Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and DevOps processes, from the beginning. Use an IaC tool like Terraform or CloudFormation to define your infrastructure "code," then use a build tool like Jenkins or GitHub Actions to automate deployment and management of your application environments on the public cloud provider. If you don't have any greenfield applications available, start by reconfiguring part of an existing legacy app into containers with Docker or Kubernetes.

Choose one business-critical application for this initial effort; something important but relatively low risk would be ideal.

Get management support and sponsorship. The nature of most organizations requires buy-in from executives who can help overcome potential obstacles (such as resource constraints) along your path to transformation in the public cloud. It also helps if they validate what's in it for them (such as increased business agility). Then organize your efforts through cross-functional teams composed of people from IT operations, development/DevOps, security operations, risk management and finance.

Five cloud migration best practices, one digital platform

As you plan your migration to the cloud, there are five key areas that need to be addressed. Each of these will require attention from different stakeholders with varying skill sets. The platform — built on a machine learning-based engine — gives every stakeholder access to a single-view interface where they can see all the information they need for productivity and process efficiency. The best thing is that you don’t have to rebuild your data center (or your team) in order to migrate and run applications in the public cloud.

Plan and Prioritize Workloads

Design the Right Migration Approach

Configure and Test Your Environments

Migrate and Validate Your Applications

Optimize and Manage Your Cloud Environment

Migrating to public cloud is crucial to your digital transformation

When your IT infrastructure is in the cloud, it is easier to deploy new applications and services quickly. You can set up new virtual machines in seconds and start running them immediately. The cloud gives you more visibility into your IT environment, too, so you can see what's running, how many customers are using it, and what the load on each system is. This lets you scale your services to meet demands automatically, without a huge burden on budgets.

The cloud also makes it easier for you to gain new insights from your data by adding analytics capabilities that let you analyze large amounts of data quickly, and give employees a powerful way to explore information using business intelligence tools that help uncover trends and patterns across any dimension or variable in your data.

Scale your enterprise IT with an agile and fully customizable ZeaCloud® Public Cloud Solutions. Get in touch with us to know more.

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