Define your mission and objectives

For a successful cloud adoption, you must define your mission and objectives. A clear mission provides direction and purpose. The objectives outline the steps that you take to achieve that mission. A mission is only valuable if you can take action on it, achieve objectives effectively, and measure the results.

You can use frameworks, such as objectives and key results (OKRs), to break your mission down into actionable steps. Frameworks can help you drive accountability and align your cloud adoption strategy with your organization's overall strategic objectives to ensure coherence and focus.

Note

The following section uses OKRs to show examples of how you can break down your cloud adoption strategy objectives into measurable key results. But you can use this guidance and these examples with any methodology or framework when you define and measure your business goals.

For more information, see What are OKRs?.

Mission statement and objectives

Your cloud adoption strategy should clarify the role of the cloud within your organization. It should also define how and when you apply the cloud to support the objectives and desired outcomes of your business, digital, and IT strategies.

Mission statement

A mission statement helps you align your objectives and key results to your organization's overall business mission.

To help you derive a statement for your business, consider these initial questions:

• Why: Why are you moving to or expanding in the cloud?
• What: What are your business objectives?
• How: How do you intend to measure success?

Use the answers to these questions to help define your mission statement for your cloud strategy. For example:

• Mission statement: "Use cloud technologies that align with our business and IT goals to empower our organization to innovate, scale, and deliver secure, high-quality services."

Objectives

Ensure that your objectives include clear and inspiring goals that align with the mission statement. For example:

• Objective for security: "Use advanced security offerings to protect your assets."
• Objective for compliance: "Use advanced compliance offerings to audit your assets."
• Objective for datacenter modernization: "Modernize infrastructure with reduced hardware and staffing. To upgrade the datacenter, migrate to Azure for enhanced capabilities."

Recommendations:

To define your mission and objectives, consider the following recommendations.

• Meet with and involve key stakeholders across your organization. Ensure that you clearly represent the business and departmental mission and objectives and that all stakeholders understand them. You might include problem statements that a cloud adoption addresses.

• Define and align cloud adoption objectives and key results. Clearly define, refine, and align the cloud objectives with your organization's mission and objectives.

• Define key results for objectives. After you define and align objectives, establish specific key results to achieve the objectives, including key performance indicators (KPIs), to measure progress.

• Establish accountability. Ensure key results have accountable roles assigned to them and ensure that key results and associated KPIs are reviewed periodically, preferably at least quarterly at the strategic level.

• Prioritize clarity. Ensure that your objectives, key results, and accountability are clear, concise, accessible and easy to understand for everyone.

Measure success

To understand if you're on track to meet your objectives, you must be able to effectively measure and track your key results. Establish KPIs or other ways to gauge progress on your mission and objectives.

These metrics should provide insights into your progress against each key result and highlight areas for improvement.

Recommendations:

To measure your success, use these guidelines when you define metrics.

• Define KPIs. Set clear metrics that you can measure against each related key result.

• Review regularly. Schedule and perform regular reviews to assess progress.

• Be agile. Iterate and adjust your strategy and ways to measure progress. Cloud innovation rapidly changes the technical landscape and the opportunities to apply clever solutions.

Example objectives and success metrics

Motivation	Objective	Key result	Success metrics or KPIs
Reduce business risk	Security: Use advanced security offerings to protect your assets.	Achieve a 35% reduction in security incidents within the next 12-month period.	Track incident reports and response times.
Reduce business risk	Security: Use advanced security offerings to protect your assets.	Implement data encryption across all platforms within the next 6-month period.	Audit encryption coverage and effectiveness monthly.
Reduce business risk	Compliance: Use advanced compliance offerings to audit your assets.	Achieve a 35% reduction in compliance audit findings within the next 12-month period.	Track compliance audit results and remediation activities.
Reduce business risk	Reliability: Improve the availability of cloud-based applications.	Achieve a 50% reduction in P1 incidents within the next quarter.	Track service-level agreement compliance, incident tickets logged, and help desk call volumes.
Enhance agility and efficiency	Investments: Optimize investments through cloud scalability and agility.	Reduce IT infrastructure spend by 20% through resource optimization in the cloud within the next 12-month period.	Analyze cost management and resource usage reports.
Enhance agility and efficiency	Investments: Optimize investments through cloud scalability and agility.	Use automated cost monitoring to identify savings opportunities.	Track cost anomalies and corrective actions that you take.
Reduce business risk	Sustainability: Achieve carbon savings and enhance green IT compliance.	Reduce carbon footprint by 20% through optimized cloud operations.	Monitor emissions reports for your deployed Azure infrastructure.
Reduce business risk	Data: Ensure data integrity.	Achieve 100% compliance with data retention and security policies.	Track the percentage of data audits that pass without incidents.
Accelerate innovation	AI: Access cutting-edge AI capabilities for transformative solutions.	Launch two new AI-driven products within the next 18-month period.	Monitor product development times and market feedback.
Accelerate innovation	AI: Access cutting-edge AI capabilities for transformative solutions.	Implement AI-driven analytics to improve decision-making by 45%.	Evaluate data accuracy and decision-making speed improvements.
Accelerate innovation	AI: Access cutting-edge AI capabilities for transformative solutions.	Decrease customer ticket response times by deploying a new AI-based customer support system within the next 12-month period.	Monitor customer satisfaction (CSAT) and ticket resolution times.
Accelerate innovation	Security: Use advanced security offerings to protect your assets.	Increase security automation to cover 80% of threat detection.	Track automated versus manual threat detections.
Accelerate innovation	Data: Enhance data accessibility.	Increase data accessibility for 90% of teams by Q3.	Track the percentage of teams that have self-service access to key data.
Enhance agility and efficiency	Rapid prototyping: Quickly prototype and access services like AI and robotic process automation.	Reduce time-to-market for new services by 20% within the next 12-month period.	Compare launch timelines before and after cloud adoption.
Enhance agility and efficiency	Developer velocity: Give engineering teams the ability to create and manage dev/test environments.	Create a self-service process to automatically deploy compliant dev environments.	Monitor the time from the request to environment readiness, the time that admin teams spend servicing requests, and the security compliance of dev environments.
Enhance agility and efficiency	Datacenter modernization: Modernize infrastructure with reduced hardware and staffing. Upgrade by migrating to Azure for enhanced capabilities.	Increase datacenter efficiency by 25% by using virtualization in the cloud.	Evaluate resource usage and operational costs, and continuously rightsize.
Enhance agility and efficiency	Datacenter modernization: Modernize infrastructure with reduced hardware and staffing. Upgrade by migrating to Azure for enhanced capabilities.	Transition to a serverless architecture for 45% of new applications in the next 12-month period.	Evaluate deployment speed and resource usage.
Enhance agility and efficiency	Data: Decouple data services from the application architecture.	Provision independent, scalable data services for 75% of development teams by Q3.	Track the percentage of applications that use decoupled data services.

Next step

Define your team for cloud adoption