Why Cloud Transformation Stalls

January 7, 2019

All over the world, enterprises are embarking on cloud transformation. They have visions of reduced costs, scalability and an improved customer experience, continuously made even better because of the agility that comes with the cloud. All too often, these expectations are flooded with the cold reality of teams unprepared for the migration.
That cold reality can come in the form of out-of-control cloud costs or employees missing deadlines on key performance indicators. How can you get your cloud transformation back on track?
Address employee concerns. It may be that you have a key group of employees that are dragging their feet on the whole concept of cloud and don’t even realize they are doing so. These employees, who are often nearing retirement, may have spent most of their careers with legacy systems and are reluctant to choose between reinventing themselves or finding their jobs irrelevant.
The key is to address the elephant in the room, allow employees to express their concerns, and come up with some agreed-upon parameters for your cloud transformation. You can’t abandon your plans for progress, but if employees feel heard, they’re more likely to get on board.
Provide adequate training. Everything looks great on the demonstration, but don’t let a branch location’s assurance that they’re in good shape keep you from scheduling adequate training. In some situations, cloud transformation stalls out because teams don’t really know how to launch an app or there’s not enough training for them to find it user-friendly.
It’s better to overcompensate with training and find out you went overboard than to watch cloud invoices balloon while nobody’s getting any benefits from the technology.
Determine which workloads belong in the cloud. Another reason that cloud migrations get stuck or companies shift workloads back to on-premise systems is that there wasn’t a set of criteria for determining what would reside in the cloud. Use a system that determines which workloads are appropriate for the cloud, and you should also decide who gets to make that determination in order to avoid shadow IT.
There are a lot of reasons why a cloud transformation can go off course. It can be a network that isn’t ready for increased data transmissions or a budget that wasn’t created with anticipation of additional security policies. Most of the time, though, it comes down to a team that’s not prepared for the transition. You can solve that problem with adequate communication, training, and policies for determining where to house workloads.
For more information on a smooth cloud transformation, contact us at Clarksys. We can help you make the most of cost-saving technology by moving the right workloads to the right cloud solutions.

Transform your business without wasting money.

We help you identify, audit and implement technology changes within your business to create leverage points to scale your company faster.