Migrating to the cloud can be a catalyst of growth for businesses of all sizes. And, with so many businesses turning to the cloud, it can be difficult to keep up without at least taking advantage of some of its benefits. But simply migrating to the cloud is not enough.

The real way to ensure that your business remains successful in the long term is to ensure that your cloud migration strategy is value-driven. This means you’re getting the most value out of every decision, ultimately pushing your business to the next level through efficiency and pure value.

In this article, we’re going to go over the ins and outs of value-driven cloud migration, and how you can plan and optimise your cloud strategy to ensure that you put value at the forefront. We’ll take a look at some of the main forms of ‘value’ and how you can get the most out of each one.

Understanding Value-Driven Cloud Migration

Value-driven cloud migration is a strategic approach to your whole cloud migration process. It focuses on value-first and prioritises the migration of workloads that will bring the most value to your business all around.

Generally speaking, this strategy will allow you to push your cloud implementation forward, as being strategic about value will help ensure that resources are only being developed to aspects of your business that will help you be prosperous in the long run, rather than overspending to migrate your whole business.

On top of this, being able to understand how much value your cloud implementation will bring you will let you plan for the future, meaning you will have a better idea of what parts of your business to prioritise and generate value with by using the cloud. This will lead to more efficiency and focus all around — and will generate success in the long run.

Planning Your Cloud Migration Strategy

Planning is vital to a value-driven cloud migration strategy. After all, being strategic means having a plan in mind — and so taking the steps to draw out your strategy and ensure that every step is calculated is vital.

Here are the basic steps you need to take when planning your cloud migration strategy:

  • Define Your Goals: What do you want to achieve with the cloud, and what does value mean to your business? By defining this, you have a mission statement that you can use to inform your strategy going forward.
  • Assess Your Infrastructure: Here, you’ll take a look at any workloads, resources, and dependencies that need to be considered in the migration process.
  • Choose A Cloud Provider: Your cloud provider will generally be a key factor in how much value you can get out of your cloud implementation — make sure to do your research and pick a provider that aligns with your goals.
  • Develop a Migration Plan: With all of this information, you can start developing your plan and working out your timeline, strategies, and the risks involved.
  • Test, then Deploy: Before deploying your cloud migration, you should first test it in a non-live environment. Then, once satisfied, deploy your workloads to the cloud, and monitor them as time goes on.

Optimising Workloads for the Cloud

Optimising your workloads for the cloud will help you get the most out of your cloud resources, generating more value all around by reducing costs and improving performance. By optimising, you’re getting the most bang for your buck.

Right-sizing is a great way to optimise your cloud workloads. This means checking that your resources are provisioned tightly, so you don’t waste resources by over-provisioning or miss out on key performance by under-provisioning.

Enhancing Data and Analytics Capabilities

The cloud allows for revolutionary data and analytics capabilities, truly changing the threshold of what’s possible when analysing data — which you can use to your advantage, to identify key insights that can get you ahead.

The cloud fully lets you take advantage of this by not only giving you the capability to do so but also letting you easily scale to meet your wider data needs — meaning that you can easily accommodate growth and ensure that you can get insights quickly and without issue.

Ensuring Cost-Efficiency and Security

When considering value, cost-efficiency is a vital concept. After all, businesses need to make money, so working out the most efficient way to make said money will be able to help your business thrive in the long term.

By taking advantage of cloud strategies such as right-sizing, automation, and spot instances, you can leverage a powerful platform with paths to save money in the long term.

Also, security investment is vital. Investing in security will protect your business in the long run, and ensure that you’re protected in the event of a nasty surprise.

Fostering Innovation in a Cloud-First Environment

The cloud and innovation go hand in hand. With innovation comes the ability to seek and extract value out of ideas, by turning them into solutions. The cloud fully enables this by allowing businesses to create a culture of experimentation, collaboration, and agility.

Simply, the cloud platform is powerful and forward-thinkers will always thrive in being able to get value from it. Cloud environments encourage collaboration by breaking down silos and allowing teams to work together more seamlessly, helping them think freely and drive innovation in the long term wherever they may be.

How We Can Help

The cloud is a vital technology for businesses, but the benefits only come when you understand the value proposition the cloud provides. After all, failing to take advantage of the capabilities of the cloud to boost value will put your business on the back foot, whereas taking the step towards smart cloud implementation will help you prosper altogether.

If you’re looking to get started with the cloud but don’t know where to begin, reach out to us today. We’re here to help and will make sure you know everything you need when it comes to migration.

Get in touch now and see how we can help.