Transitioning your cost-estimating solution to the Cloud can be a daunting experience. Below we outline a four phase approach to making your transition more successful.
Get Educated
One of the most important aspects of transitioning to the Cloud is to ensure you and your teams learn as much as you can about the Cloud, what the transition entails and what you will need to know. This will include some of the common challenges with Cloud migration, what can help make it easier and identify any knowledge gaps that exist within the organisation.
Plan
They say failing to plan is planning to fail, so you want to make sure you plan as much as possible for the transition. This means putting a plan in place and defining strategic objectives and processes specific for your organisation’s goals. This plan must also include which functions within the business should be moved into the Cloud, as not all functions will be suitable.
Formalise
Once your plans are in place, you can begin to formalise policies, standards, and an operating model to manage the solution. Policies will need to cover several areas, including:
- Contracting: What contract terms does your organisation need to be aware of and manage?
- Financial Management: What are the financial requirements to transition to the Cloud from budgeting, payments and accounting?
- Vendor Management: Outlining who exactly is responsible for the Cloud and what are they responsible for is crucial.
- Data Management: How will the management of data within the Cloud be performed?
- IT Security Management: What are the security considerations for transitioning to the Cloud, that including data security?
- Governance: How will decisions regarding the Cloud be made, and who holds the responsibility?
Evolve
The final phase of the transition comes from your organisation embracing its new cloud environment and taking full advantage of the potential for innovation and experimentation. Cloud based solutions, such as PaaS (platform-as-a-solution) and SaaS (software-as-a-solution), can offer clients the chance to rapidly and with little upfront monetary commitment evolve their business processes, allowing an easily scalable set of procedures that are available, secure, and up to date.
While adoption and acceptance may require change management and training from an organisational point of view, the modern capabilities of the Cloud will revolutionise the way that employees can do their jobs, inevitably enabling a more effective and motivated workforce.
