Develop a cloud adoption strategy

The cloud delivers fundamental technology benefits that can help your enterprise execute multiple business strategies. By using cloud-based approaches, you can:

• Improve business agility
• Reduce costs
• Accelerate time to market
• Enable expansion into new markets

To take advantage of this great potential, start by documenting your business strategy in a way that's both understandable to cloud technicians and palatable to your business stakeholders.

The following steps help you document your business strategy efficiently. This approach helps you drive adoption efforts that capture targeted business value in a cross-functional model. Then, you can map your cloud adoption strategy to specific cloud capabilities. You can also map business strategies to reach your expected state of transformation.

	Define and document your motivations: Meet with key stakeholders and executives to document the motivations behind cloud adoption.
	Document business outcomes: Engage motivated stakeholders and executives to document specific business outcomes.
	Evaluate financial considerations: Learn how to use the cloud to make your IT cost structure more flexible. Then, build a business case to adopt the cloud.
	Understand technical considerations: Discover the technical flexibility, efficiencies, and capabilities that help you build a business case to adopt the cloud.

Take the Cloud Adoption Strategy Evaluator assessment that will help you build a business case to enable your cloud journey.

Use the results from the assessment—and continue to build your cloud adoption strategy by using the strategy and plan template to track the output of each of the four steps above, documenting your business strategy.