IDC has released its figures on the market and the evolution of cloud. Unsurprisingly, SaaS continues its surge with more than 60% of market share expected. PaaS is also gaining ground year after year, with nearly 15% of market share expected by year-end. The IaaS segment remains at 20% of market share, but tends to diminish in favour of PaaS. The trend is moving towards more cloud. The figures are clearly increasing with + 20% additional market share year over year.
Is the cloud indispensable?
Certainly! Nevertheless, for 25% of companies, the journey towards transformation had not yet begun, or had only just started in 2022.
What are the essential steps to take before embarking on a modernisation and cloud transition strategy? How can you gain sufficient perspective on your existing infrastructure and the maturity of your IT system?
We help you gain clarity and make the right decisions to kick-start your Cloud transformation with peace of mind thanks to our offer Cloud Assessment.
Transition to the cloud in 6 major steps
Due to the multitude of projects carried out in the context of cloud transitions, we have sorted, classified, and referenced in 6 key steps a typical cloud migration project that we are sharing with you:
At the start of the journey, sharing the vision and defining the strategy:
Sharing new directions and engaging teams around a shared vision is essential for the success of any transformation. Proposing the implementation of a "Cloud Programme" makes it possible to bring together all project stakeholders in a workshop setting, from senior management to business teams, from the CIO/CISO to human resources and any other identified key actors.
These workshops make it possible to share a common vision, the challenges, constraints, and expectations around the public cloud and design a cloud adoption strategy as well as the means to achieve it.
Long-haul flight or low-cost airline, … when the choice of provider arises
Once the destination has been outlined, the choice of your Cloud provider is the second critical element. Take the time to carefully compare cloud providers in order to ensure consistency between your strategy, your existing infrastructure, service catalogues, hosting regions, and contractual aspects…
Our FinOps offering, which enables the assessment of future cloud costs to compare them with your Datacenter costs...
Define your flight plan:
This step will enable you to implement your cloud adoption approach and its foundations. We support our clients in preparing their organisation around a Cloud Center of Excellence framework. We also define and put in place the fundamentals of the landing zone, integrating structural elements such as the organisation of subscriptions and accounts, network segmentation, technical governance, and more. This step will allow you to conduct initial experiments on the public cloud and progressively migrate your applications onto a solid foundation. Secure and high-performance Cloud.
Take a break:
You have launched your project, your cloud provider has been identified, your teams have been briefed… Have you thought of everything? This is where the eligibility audit comes in. This audit has several objectives: mapping your current IT estate to identify modernisation scenarios, determining the organisational changes to consider in order to leverage your cloud solutions, and then defining a business case as well as a cloud transformation roadmap.
We strongly advise you not to overlook this eligibility audit step, which proves crucial for subsequent operations. We address this point in detail below.
Ready for takeoff:
Once the audit has been completed, the migration project launch phase begins. Preparation, design, migration, modernisation of applications and infrastructure, Datacenter rationalisation … Toutes les équipes sont prêtes pour le lancement du projet opérationnel et tout est sous contrôle.
Holidays!
After several months of project work, the migration is finally complete. The opportunity arises to (re)assess and identify the first lessons learned from this implementation. It is also the time to address the challenges of managed services for your cloud-based services, as well as performance and financial optimisation through FinOps.
You have seen it through these different steps! Implementing a cloud transition strategy is complex due to its various areas to master (and we have not told you everything yet). Managing this project is even more demanding when one must handle the aspects of migration, through to the management and optimisation of services in the cloud.
Delegating the management of a cloud migration project is the best option in order to focus on your core business, your internal organisation, as well as the overall monitoring of the project and key success indicators. A knowledge transfer to internal teams can also be undertaken to increase your autonomy, expertise and ability to innovate and advise your business units.
Why conduct an eligibility audit?
This is a legitimate question — during a cloud transition project, we often tend to focus on the technical aspects related to the cloud provider. A cloud eligibility audit will assess the eligibility of your company's existing technical and application assets, as well as your organisational maturity and the economic added value. It also takes into account possible modernisation options (pooling, containerisation, etc.) for any asset that may not be eligible for migration to the public cloud. It is a genuine decision-support tool to help you design your modernisation strategy.
What can an eligibility audit bring you?
Whether at the upstream phase of the project, at the midpoint, or in the form of a REX, the eligibility audit delivers numerous benefits that directly depend on your needs. We have listed the main advantages you can draw from it, which will allow you to:
- Share a cloud vision and strategy aligned with the business challenges at hand
- Prepare for change by mobilising your key stakeholders
- Master your current IT estate
- Diagnose your organisation in "flash" mode and assess its maturity
- Provide key arguments regarding your ability to migrate to the cloud and modernise your application portfolio
- Prepare your transformation project and share feedback to make it a success
- Promote your business case and roadmap to your executive leadership
How to audit your own assets?
Are you convinced of the benefits this audit can bring you? But is it possible to maintain a neutral position when auditing your own IT? Do we have the capacity to step back sufficiently in order to provide a critical perspective on the existing situation?
You can carry out this eligibility audit yourself; however, we recommend engaging a consultancy firm such as ST DIGITAL to carry out this mission.
Our senior Cloud Advisor consultants can support you in your cloud transition project, as well as in setting up a comprehensive eligibility audit. Two profiles work alongside you: a cloud strategy consultant and a solutions architect. We can also call upon specific expertise if in-depth studies are required (e.g. Oracle database modernisation).
We work in an agile mode, co-constructing with our clients through multiple iterations and several phases, namely:
- Discovery of technical and application assets
- The diagnostic in the form of a SWOT analysis across 4 dimensions: (Technical, functional-applicative, organizational, economic, and partner ecosystem).
- The eligibility matrix and assessment of assets to be migrated, including the various migration options, complexity levels, added value, and migration batches.
- The roadmap with a comprehensive migration plan
Read also: