Determine your motivations
The purpose of this article is to help you understand and define motivations for your cloud adoption strategy. These motivations are crucial for IT decision-makers and executives because they help ensure alignment with strategic business objectives, maximize return on investment, and facilitate informed decision making.
Clear motivations help prioritize initiatives, streamline resource allocation, and mitigate risks by addressing specific business needs. These needs can include reducing operational costs, enhancing security, and driving innovation.
By clearly defining these motivations, organizations can harness the full potential of cloud technologies, improve agility, and maintain a competitive edge in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
You can achieve motivations for cloud adoption directly or indirectly. For instance, improving your resilience or optimizing your costs might be the direct result of moving from on-premises architecture into platform as a service in the cloud. Alternatively, these results can be an indirect outcome of other improvements, such as accelerating the delivery of business applications.
Define your motivations
Motivations for adopting and expanding your cloud footprint can vary. The following motivations are common examples that you might encounter. Use these examples to guide your decision making and inform your strategy.
Reduce business risk
Security: Use advanced security offerings to protect your assets.
Sustainability: Achieve carbon savings and enhance green IT compliance.
Resiliency: Increase redundancy and resilience through cloud capabilities, including multiregion deployments.
Business continuity: Use the capabilities of the cloud for high availability and uptime guarantees. Establish disaster recovery (DR) routines by using reliable backup and recovery solutions.
Datacenter modernization: Modernize infrastructure by reducing hardware and staffing. Upgrade by migrating to Azure for enhanced capabilities.
Data governance: Minimize risks by implementing robust data governance. This approach helps ensure compliance and security across decentralized data sources.
Compliance management: Minimize compliance risks by using policies that block or alert deployments that don't align with your compliance requirements.
Financial transparency: Gain more visibility into financial aspects of cloud investments for leadership teams, including detailed billing and usage reports.
Cloud scale: Use the cloud's built-in redundancy and DR capabilities to help ensure business continuity and mitigate operational risks.
Accelerate innovation
AI: Access cutting-edge AI capabilities for transformative solutions.
Cloud native: Benefit from exclusive cloud capabilities that aren't available elsewhere.
Security: Use robust security controls to securely enhance innovation.
Customer solutions: Develop software as a service offerings and consumer apps efficiently.
Shared responsibility: Focus IT efforts on delivering business value.
Data empowerment: Use accessible data to democratize insights. This strategy drives rapid, data-driven innovation across teams.
Compliance empowerment: Apply policies to make compliance a feature of the solutions that you develop instead of an assessment that they need to pass later.
Cost flexibility: Use the pay-as-you-go cost model to easily drive short-term innovative projects and proof-of-concept solutions without the need to own anything when you shut them down.
Enhance agility and efficiency
Profitability improvement potential: Accelerate business growth and optimize investments by using operational efficiency opportunities, cloud innovation, enhanced security, flexibility, and scalability.
Multicloud opportunities: Support multicloud strategies by using Azure integration.
Rapid prototyping: Quickly prototype and access services like AI and robotic process automation.
Simplified operations: Use consistent tooling and platforms across your workloads to improve visibility and enable collaborative work across technical disciplines.
Decoupled data services: Use decoupled data services, which are independent and scalable. These services free application architecture from data dependencies and enable agility in application development.
Cloud scale: Use modern capabilities to scale up and down according to your business requirements.
Software-defined compliance: Infrastructure as code and software-based policy controls allow you to more easily adjust to regulation changes.
Classify motivations
After you identify your motivations and key considerations, you need to assess and prioritize your needs. Follow these steps when you document your motivations:
Assess needs: Identify which motivations align with your organization's strategic goals.
Prioritize: Define the priority and urgency for each line item in each motivation.
Iterate and review: Revisit and adjust priorities regularly as the business needs change. When you later define your mission and goals, link them to your motivations and expand as necessary.
Example classification
The following table lists examples of classifications of motivations and key considerations that are linked to business priority and urgency.
| Motivation category | Consideration | Priority | Urgency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reduce business risk | Security | High | High |
| Reduce business risk | Sustainability | Medium | Low |
| Reduce business risk | Resiliency | High | Medium |
| Accelerate innovation | AI | High | High |
| Accelerate innovation | Customer solutions | High | Medium |
| Enhance agility and efficiency | Maximize investments | High | High |
Use your classified motivations to inform the priorities and urgency of your goals.