Read time: 5 minutes
Public cloud adoption offers organizations access to scalable infrastructure, cost efficiencies, and innovation at speed. Navigating the migration successfully requires balancing speed with thorough planning, avoiding common cost traps, and implementing governance structures that sustain value over time.
Best Practices for Cloud Migration
IT leaders who have successfully navigated public cloud migration at scale follow consistent principles:
- Use business drivers to propel the cloud strategy
- Set clear expectations with executive stakeholders by contrasting the strengths and risks of the initiative
- Address resistance through transparency, reassuring staff, and engaging influential early supporters
- Balance a people-centric view with a focus on cloud for access to innovation
- Invest in a cloud training program for staff
Four Cost Traps to Avoid
Organizations often migrate to the cloud to reduce infrastructure costs, but without proper planning may face unexpected expenses. Four cost traps to avoid:
- Poorly conceived migration: Develop a detailed business case, define success metrics, and set realistic timelines that balance risk, value, and cost.
- Inexperienced resources: Effective migration requires specialized program management, migration-related intellectual property (IP), and experienced partners.
- Inefficient cloud purchasing: Cloud architects should work with sourcing managers on long-term contracts, reserved instances, and savings plans for predictable workloads.
- Failure to transform IT operations: Convert IT service management with an automation-first approach and cloud-optimize workloads to sustain value after go-live
Implementing Cloud Governance
The shift to cloud distributes computing power from central IT to individual business units, creating new governance challenges. IT is now responsible for protecting the organization from risk while ensuring business units maintain agility and freedom to innovate.
Five-step solution path for cloud governance:
- Form a governance team and document operating models
- Define principles and goals
- Implement programmatic controls (guardrails)
- Develop cloud usage policies
- Assess compliance, refine, and optimize
Governance is not a one-time exercise. An ongoing cycle of audit and improvement is integral to a long-term cloud governance strategy, including regular audits of shadow IT and continuous refinement of principles, controls, and policies as gaps emerge.
Supporting Your Cloud Journey
Crowe supports organizations through cloud advisory, IT governance design, and cybersecurity services, helping build a migration strategy that delivers on its business case and a governance model that sustains value over time.