The 5 Stages of Cloud Adoption

So, still not in the cloud and the thought of doing so feels like you’re taking a huge jump into unknown waters? We’re seeing more enterprises starting to dip their toe in the water with Microsoft Azure. Microsoft has shown their commitment to where they’re going with their cloud infrastructure and the growth has been tremendous.

Let’s look at the 5 stages or steps of cloud adoption to ease the fear of taking the leap:

Step 1 – Chaos – In most cases, there’s some chaotic event that makes businesses start looking at alternative ways to service their customers or their business. Maybe a server dies, or software comes to the end of life or support. The cloud then becomes a viable option and people start to consider it.

Step 2 – Awareness – Once the cloud is on the plate, people start by ramping up their cloud knowledge. They may start with training, hackathons, POCs or try to some hands-on opportunities, like setting up an Azure Active Directory to sync with their on-premises AD. Building knowledge leads to Step 3.

Step 3 – Security – Most companies get hung up with security concerns around the cloud. I can tell you that Microsoft has spent more money than any other company worldwide on security—over one billion spent in 2017. They are committed to making their customers security a top priority. Through their commitment they have 72 government and standardization certificates; their closest competitor, AWS, only has 44.

To overcome your fear, you need to realize that with Azure, you have an entire team of security experts watching your data and servers, as well as implementing best practices and creating new ways and policies to help companies avoid any kind of breach.

Step 4 – Governance – So, you’ve gotten over security concerns and have put your trust in the Azure public cloud, now you must develop best practices, policies and procedures around governance. The good news is when you start looking at service offerings, whether it’s PaaS, SaaS or IaaS, Microsoft has the best in class offerings and they’re managing a good portion of that security for you.

Step 5 – Optimization – Once you’ve got your environment in the cloud, how do you optimize it for performance and cost effectiveness? Take the time to choose the best services for your business and optimize your servers to minimize cost and run those servers in the best way; this can become a differentiator against your competitors.

We are helping many of our over 7,000 customers around the world with their questions around these topics. If you have questions and are ready to get past dipping your toe in the water, we’re the people to talk to. Click the link below to get started—we’d love to help.