Cloud in an enterprise is hard. A lot harder than most people might think. And yet so easy to get wrong. Don’t make the same mistakes!

This article is part of the limited preview of the “The Missing Cloud Programme Roadmap”, a generic roadmap for any enterprise cloud adoption programme.

1. Executive Summary
2. The Cloud and Enterprises
   1. Cloud is Part of the Future
      1. The Advantages for Cloud Companies
      2. The Opportunities for Traditional Enterprises
   2. Cloud is Hard
   3. Cloud in Highly Regulated Industries is Even Harder
3. The Missing Cloud Programme Roadmap
4. A Cloudy Future

Cloud is Hard

When it comes to the corporate world then, despite what marketing campaigns and customer success stories haven been telling for years,

Cloud is hard. A lot harder than most people might think. And yet so easy to get wrong.

Take the frequently celebrated elasticity for example. If scaling in and out is supposed to be the new modus operandi — What is actually supposed to be scaled in and out?

If it’s a business process — How did it get there in the first place? Who put it there and why? Are there records for that? Where is the process now running? What is the process actually doing? Is there a way to monitor it? Is there a way to do all of that six weeks from now when the process has long been terminated? What about…

Most CSPs have readily available solutions to answer the above questions within the context of their platform offerings. While those can certainly ease the adoption of cloud, most businesses still require a certain degree of integration with their existing systems and processes. And that’s usually where the going gets tough.

Anyone can build something in isolation. Seamlessly integrating it into the existing corporate ecosystem is the real challenge.

Not all corporate systems or processes are built for the speed of the cloud. Let alone have a programmatic way of accessing them in the first place. Fancy an example?

For any organisation above a certain size, there’s a decent chance it already has a corporate asset management system which essentially keeps accurate records about the firm’s assets. Now, if that system was built for manual entries of severs built every quarter, then the adoption of cloud just became a lot harder.

It’s the obvious, hidden, and unknown dependencies that increase the level of complexity when adopting cloud across an enterprise organisation.

How to unearth the dependencies and plan for most eventualities (as all of them is quite unrealistic)?! Well, a strategy that outlines the milestones and key deliverables on a roadmap would be a decent start.

Cloud in Highly Regulated Industries is Even Harder

Find out more about it in the next article.

So, How Do You Adopt the Cloud?!

While the above Worx for Me!™ when it comes to adopting the cloud in an enterprise, you may have an alternative or better way.

Think this is all rubbish, massively overrated, or generally heading into the absolutely wrong direction?! Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn and teach me something new!

As always, prove me wrong and I’ll buy you a pint!