The Cloud Is Ready When You Are

Cloud Momentum Is Real, So What Are You Waiting For?

Cloud has gone mainstream, and it’s driving how organizations go to market, operate, and innovate. It also creates pressure for organizations to move to cloud or risk falling behind competitors that are leveraging cloud for digital and business transformation.

In the rush to cloud, however, many organizations aren’t so quick to jump on the bandwagon and see where it takes them. Instead, they’re taking a wait-and-see approach before making cloud investments and looking for guidance before taking the leap.

Fortunately, there are frameworks that can help. For example, the Open Alliance for Cloud Adoption has developed a cloud maturity model to help organizations determine what their cloud journey should look like. With the model as a guide, you can analyze your current state and then plan for the implementation of cloud technologies to suit the needs of your business.

Even if some organizations are on the cloud sidelines, there’s no denying that cloud adoption is accelerating. According to Gartner research, 51% of IT spending for application software, infrastructure software, business process services, and system infrastructure will shift to cloud by 2025. In 2020, approximately 50% of all corporate data was stored in the cloud. Cloud-native projects in production continue to grow, with many reaching more than 50% use in production.

Yes, cloud momentum is real. But so are the concerns among organizations that are reluctant to make the move.

Fools Rush in… and Can Face Unexpected Challenges

Organizations can often discover that, while the benefits of cloud are clear, the way to get there isn’t. And even if you do manage to get started, there can be unwelcome surprises along the way.

According to the Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report, enterprises surveyed indicated that the top three challenges associated with cloud adoption are:

1. Security (83%)
2. Managing cloud spend (82%)
3. Governance (79%)

Understanding application dependencies is also a concern; it is often cited as one of the main obstacles to moving to cloud. A skills gap also has IT leaders struggling with their ability to attract and retain the talent necessary to execute and support a cloud strategy. At the same time, you have significant investments in your data center that you want to leverage, but the benefits of cloud are exactly what your data center can’t give your business.

Still, digital transformation is a mandate in today’s hypercompetitive environment. As business models evolve, customer expectations escalate, and the ability to move fast becomes an imperative, cloud becomes key to supporting organizational growth and agility.

So, where do you start?

More than half (55%) of organizations currently use multiple public clouds, with 21% saying they use three or more.²

Get Cloud Ready and Cloud Smart

You start by starting.

Even if you don’t plan to go all in on cloud or move a good portion of your workloads there tomorrow, cloud needs to become a strategic lever you can take advantage of when the time comes. That means becoming cloud ready by having a strategy defined and well-architected landing zone(s), so that when the time does come, you can hit the ground running. After all, the last thing you want to do when the business comes to you and says, “Let’s spin this up in the cloud,” is respond with, “Okay, give me a couple of months to figure out how to get that done.” Or even worse, rushing to get it done and putting your organization at risk by not being planful, which can lead to data breaches, rework, and cost overruns. A well-architected landing zone and cohesive strategy ensure that security, compliance, and governance are integral in your cloud adoption.

EchoStor can help get you cloud ready with an experienced team of professionals who can get you from plan to production. That may mean identifying opportunities to begin leveraging cloud to take advantage of benefits in specific areas of the business—for example, disaster recovery, business continuity, or as a secondary data center. Often, it includes identifying cloud-native workloads that are very difficult to build and license on premises, such as internet of things (IoT) or big data projects.

From developing a cloud strategy framework to creating a cloud adoption roadmap based on your applications, existing environment, cloud economics, and modernization goals, EchoStor’s cloud-smart approach balances cloud adoption with your organization’s unique circumstances, goals, and business value.

Organizations can often discover that, while the benefits of cloud are clear, the way to get there isn’t. And even if you do manage to get started, there can be unwelcome surprises along the way.

Discover how EchoStor can help you get cloud ready and align cloud investments with your business strategy with an upcoming webinar: Cloud Momentum is Real, So What Are You Waiting For?

¹ Moore, Susan, Gartner Says More Than Half of Enterprise IT Spending in Key Market Segments Will Shift to the Cloud by 2025, Gartner, February 2022.

² Foundry, Cloud computing study 2022, April 2022.