Introduction
- 5 minutes
A cloud adoption strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines your organization's approach when you adopt and integrate cloud technologies. To establish a cloud adoption strategy, you must understand the specific needs and objectives of your business so that you can effectively align your cloud initiatives with overall business goals.
Benefits of a cloud adoption strategy
Realize value. A well-defined cloud adoption strategy helps you realize the full value of your cloud investments. Optimize cloud investments to provide financial efficiency, cost optimization, and business agility.
Ensure business-driven decisions. Align cloud adoption with business goals to maximize value and support measurable outcomes.
Drive alignment among business, IT, and finance teams to achieve unified goals.
Mitigate modernization risks. Create a roadmap to safely rearchitect legacy systems and integrate cloud technologies.
Enable continuous strategy improvement. Use a well-defined and continuously evolving cloud adoption strategy to better address challenges, such as unexpected costs, siloed work environments, and unrealized cloud investment value.
Build a cloud adoption strategy
Use the following iterative steps to develop a cloud adoption strategy that aligns with your business goals.
Assess your cloud adoption strategy. Evaluate your organization's readiness for cloud adoption.
Define your motivations. Identify your reasons for adopting cloud technologies.
Define your mission and objectives. Establish a clear mission and measurable objectives for your cloud motivations.
Define your strategy team. Identify individuals and teams that can help build and implement your strategy.
Prepare your organization. Get leadership and executive buy-in, align your organizational strategies, understand your operating model's readiness for cloud, and consider a shift to a product model.
Inform your strategy. Discover strategic considerations for the important cloud strategy areas: financial efficiency, AI, resiliency, security, and sustainability.
The Strategy methodology checklist provides an overview of the tasks that you should complete for each step.