Don’t Make These Business-Busting Cloud Strategy Mistakes

Gartner predicts that by 2024, 70% of workloads will be in the cloud. As a result, organizations must urgently nail down a solid cloud strategy to maximize all the benefits the cloud offers.

An effective cloud strategy should be a concise living document that outlines the role cloud computing will play in your organization. Seems simple, right? The trouble is, as many business and IT leaders have discovered, a single mistake can sink your cloud strategy and have cascading consequences for your organization.

To help you find success, we’re breaking down the top ten most common cloud computing mistakes you need to avoid while developing your cloud strategy.

Top 11 Cloud Strategy Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)

1. Thinking it’s Too Late to Craft a Cloud Strategy

Sometimes, organizations reach a point in their cloud research journey and think, “We’re too far down the rabbit hole to write down a strategy document. We know we need to move to the cloud, so let’s just migrate.”

Unfortunately, skipping the official cloud strategy can spark resistance from employees who aren’t on the same page regarding why you need the cloud and how it’ll be used. At best, this resistance will slow down your adoption rates, and at worst, it could jeopardize your implementation. It’s never too late to establish your cloud strategy, no matter how far along you are in the research or implementation process.

Additionally, know that your cloud strategy will be a living document that you should update as your needs for the cloud evolve. To ensure a dynamic strategy, don’t just consult members of your Cloud Center of Excellence (CoE) (you’ll learn more about CoEs in mistake #11.) You should also regularly check in with leaders across your organization as they migrate to the cloud. Ask them for any achievements, mistakes, and lessons they’ve learned so you can incorporate them into your cloud strategy so old mistakes aren’t repeated. It’ll also give you an idea of how the cloud is being used in various areas of the organization, which will inform your evolving strategy.

2. Confusing a Cloud Strategy with a Cloud Adoption Plan

Organizations often confuse a cloud strategy for a cloud adoption plan. In reality, your cloud strategy and cloud adoption plan should be two separate but aligned documents. Together, they will drive your cloud migration but know that it’s best to form your cloud strategy first. Having a firm idea of your “why” will help you establish the “how” more precisely and with the correct vision.

3. Assuming it’s an IT-Only Strategy

For many, when the prospects of a cloud migration project come up, their minds go straight to the technology side of things, making it automatically an “IT project.” But this can lead to trouble when you have to sell the idea of cloud computing to the rest of the business who had zero input in its strategy.

Successful cloud migration isn’t solely reliant on the input of your IT department. To truly thrive, your cloud strategy needs to involve individuals outside of IT, too. Bringing in a diverse set of skills, knowledge, and perspectives to shape your cloud strategy and governance can increase approval and user adoption.

4. Treating Talent Transformation as a One-Time Event

You can’t have a successful cloud implementation without transforming your talent first. This may require training sessions, knowledge-base articles, recorded screen share walk-throughs, and FAQ documents. But unfortunately, many organizations stop there, making talent transformation a one-time deal. This mistake can seriously sink a cloud project in the long term.

Prioritizing long-term training in your cloud strategy will ensure that staff internalize the information they learn, apply it to their work, and keep up with the evolving world of the cloud. That means they’ll be better able to maintain your cloud system after your go-live. To your employees’ on the road to progress, make sure your strategy defines success and specifies how to measure it. For example, you might use certifications as a way to measure learning. In this case, you could set a goal number of certified employees and specify the distribution of certifications you expect to see across various departments in your organization.

Additionally, be sure to ask for regular feedback from managers and their teams on how the migration has been going on their end, particularly what’s been working well and what hasn’t. You can use these insights to further improve your strategy for better results.

5. Losing Sight of the Bigger Picture

Migration itself can be intimidating. So, it’s no surprise that many organizations focus most of their strategy on short-term migration goals and let long-term outcomes take a back seat. But when you set your sights on migration over scalability or reliability, you’re at a high risk of seeing very few long-term benefits. Instead of trying to solve the easy problems first, start with the tougher, more abstract issues. Cloud migration is truly an enterprise transformation, not a one-and-done implementation. To succeed, you need a vision of where you want to be in 10+ years before migrating.

6. Outsourcing Your Cloud Strategy

Outsourcing your cloud strategy may seem convenient, but it’s way too important to leave it up to outside perspectives. While third parties will do their best to work with you to capture all your needs and goals, it’ll always be better to go through the strategizing process yourself with the internal knowledge and context you and your team possess. It may be helpful for you to ask your cloud provider for outside input, but they shouldn’t create the entire strategy for you.

7. Taking a Cloud-Only Approach Instead of a Cloud-First Approach

Taking a cloud-first approach to your cloud strategy can help you maximize the benefits of this technology across the enterprise. But mistaking cloud-first for cloud-only can be counter-productive. Sure, a cloud-first approach rules that a business should always first consider cloud computing solutions when addressing existing or new processes. But that doesn’t mean the cloud-based option always needs to be picked. In some scenarios, the cloud isn’t always better. We recommend taking a cloud-first approach, but to avoid going too all-in, take the time to work out the exceptions to the “cloud as a default” rule.

8. Treating Cloud as an Add-On

It’s tough to shift away from “the way we’ve always done it” to new innovative processes. Even after you finally develop a fantastic idea to streamline your old method, you still have to break down employee resistance to change. This makes it easy to get stuck in the cycle of rapidly acquiring new cloud services they may not be equipped to manage without improving the processes themselves.

But taking a broken process or outdated system and moving it to the cloud won’t produce the results you want. That’s why your cloud strategy needs to emphasize the importance of process improvement. Treat the cloud as your foundation, not a supplement. And to get your staff warmed up to continual improvement and learning, look for ways to encourage an innovative mindset (click here to get our 9 best ideas on how to foster an innovative culture.)

9. Moving Too Slowly

Thorough research and caution are vital for any business venture of the cloud’s scale. But dragging your heels can backfire. Technology is constantly barreling toward progress, and that includes cloud computing. As a result, keeping pace with the speed of change is often the biggest roadblock to cloud transformation, especially for larger organizations that struggle to be agile.

To keep your cloud transformation moving, project leaders should look for instances where progress may be stalling unnecessarily and identify solutions to move forward. For example, as you go through the research and testing phases, avoid the urge to test on small scales for extended periods.

No cloud project will stick to its planned timeline 100%, and sometimes stalls are unavoidable. But proactively monitoring progress will help you stay on track to progress.

10. Seeing an Executive Mandate as a Stand-Alone Strategy

Another common mistake organizations make is to pursue the cloud simply because the head of the company or an IT leader believes it’s necessary. Getting this stamp of approval is a great start – after all, getting executive buy-in is vital to getting any digital transformation initiative off the ground. But your strategy can’t begin and end there.

Instead, view this executive mandate as your golden opportunity to create a cloud strategy. Your fully formed cloud strategy will be better equipped to sell your staff on the cloud than a top-down order.
Think of it this way: If an employee asks you, “Why are we moving to the cloud,” you can provide your reasons, goals, and how it’ll impact their daily workload. That’ll be far better received than having to answer, “Because our CEO sees it as a strategic imperative.”

11. Neglecting Your Cloud Center of Excellence

Sure, your staff is already busy, but a Cloud Center of Excellence (CoE) really is necessary if you’re going to make the most of our investment. It takes diverse skills and experiences to make a cloud migration successful now and in the future. So, assembling a multidisciplinary team of employees from across your organization and putting them to work is worth the effort. But as important as they are, many organizations struggle to build and maintain a centralized CoE, and it often ends up falling to the wayside. You can make your CoE a pillar of your cloud strategy by:

• Address Potential Barriers Early: Identify and address potential challenges that could hinder the success of your CoE. This could include employee bandwidth, priorities, cultural barriers, or resistance to change.
• Establish Success Metrics: Define clear KPIs that will measure the impact of the CoE’s efforts and overall cloud migration. This could include metrics relating to security improvements, resource optimization, and savings. Having a way to measure progress will help bring your CoE momentum. Better yet, you’ll know when you reach a milestone, which you can celebrate together.
• Allocating Sufficient Resources: Make sure your CoE has enough resource in terms of budget, staff, and tools.
• Set Aside Time to Meet and Assess Progress: One of the biggest contributors to cloud CoEs fizzling out is the lack of time and priorities. Set aside specific time frames at a defined frequency and work with company management to establish the cloud CoE as a priority for all employees who are members of it.
• Stay In Touch with Leadership: Keep in contact with top leadership. This will give you the chance to demonstrate the CoE’s value and you’ll be able to receive their support when needed.

Set Yourself Up for Success

The cloud has no shortage of benefits to offer, and you can maximize them by steering clear of the cloud computing mistakes we’ve just explored. With the right input and focus, you can build a strong cloud strategy to support a successful implementation and an agile future.

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