In general, the CLOUD adoption activities should have a pre-adoption review, planning, execution, testing and post-adoption review to make sure things go well for you.

1. Pre-Adoption Review

• In the beginning, you could assess and analyze your IT organization overall readiness to complete this adoption job. Assure that you and your team have the expertise, resources, budget and time to do below items:
  • Roll out the cloud adoption project, while on the other hand, also doing IT operational activities
  • Fulfill all requirements
  • Deploy new processes as necessary
  • Architect the cloud to achieve metrics, objectives and goals
  • Operate and maintain your cloud services, products or resources
  • Review the migration project based on key SUCCESS criteria

On condition that most of, or better, all the answers are yes, you could do this assignment alone. Otherwise, you could identify the adoption partner based on scores of measurements like the vendor’s capability, experience, resources, support, tools, portfolio and their client’s testimonials.

• Identify cloud adoption baseline metrics and Key Performance INDICATORS (KPI) namely page response time, database load time, availability, confidentiality, integrity (data completeness and accuracy), CPU utilization and memory usage.

Both metrics and KPI will help you to understand the current state of your IT environment and determine whether your adoption is successfully completed.

• Assuming your answer is the first, you could identify and select the right cloud services (type and model) and also the cloud provider that suits your organization and their requirements

1. Planning

Develop your cloud-adoption plan that accommodates the below factors:

• Determine the APPROACH: short sprint vs big bang.
• Evaluate what to migrate (software, application, platform, infrastructure, data).
• Consider the architecture and dependency.
• Identify what to move first.
• Assess if there is any change in architecture needed.
• Analyze whether the migration will impact the performance.
• Discover how the new service will operate.
• Give thought to operational continuity.
• Prepare on how to deal with downtime.
• Recognize governance and compliance concerns.
• Make ourselves ready with audit and security issues.
• Work up with other risks.
• Techniques and tools utilized in the migration.
• Support (internal and external) during and after the migration.

1. Execution

In big-bang (do it all at once) scenario, it drives a huge change over a longer period of time as you move your entire computing components over and run a test to see if it works as expected. Presuming you take short-sprint (do it a little bit at a time) option, you migrate your computing component over, validating it then continuing these activities until all components are moved to the cloud.

1. Testing

You are urged to make sure EVERYTHING is working by conducting the test. It could be manual or automated, based on plenty of scenarios, by capitalizing the previously agreed baseline metrics and KPIs as key success criteria.

1. Post-Adoption Review

It constitutes three main points: what went well (good things), what’s the room for improvement (bad things), and what’s the action plan (to improve the bad).