Cloud Adoption: The Essential Shift Every Business Must Make to Thrive

Cloud is revolutionizing industries, posing risks for those who resist it while creating opportunities for those who embrace it.

It is a key driver of innovation and growth, allowing businesses to thrive in the market and stay ahead of their competitors.

According to the G2 study, 42% of businesses were able to retain their continuity in the market because of cloud adoption. Not just this, 43% of businesses have scaled their service levels, and 40% have met the expectations they had set during the initial planning. Undoubtedly, they have mastered the adoption process. 

Now the question arises: How can you ensure similar success in your business? To find the answer, read our comprehensive blog on cloud adoption. We cover everything you need to know, from its benefits and challenges to strategies for successful implementation.   

Let’s get started!

What Is Cloud Adoption?

It is the process of incorporating or implementing cloud technology or computing services across various functions of your business. It is much more than just migrating to the cloud! 

This process involves rethinking and redesigning your business processes, optimizing them, and leveraging advanced technologies such as AI, machine learning, big data analytics, and more.

This strategic process involves:

• Planning to adopt the cloud
• Choosing your cloud provider
• Developing a roadmap
• Migrating your workloads to the cloud 
• Ongoing use of cloud technologies and services such as Iaas, Paas, and Saas
• Training your employees to make the best use of the cloud
• Ensuring cloud governance  

Suppose you are an e-commerce business selling textile products but leverage physical servers for storing your customer data, product details, order records, and more. 

However, as your business grows, you face server downtime, difficulty accessing data remotely, and storage shortages. Scaling your physical servers will incur heavy costs.

As a result, you plan to adopt the cloud. You move your data and applications to a cloud platform of your choice, enabling you to store data on remote data centers. With this, you can scale your storage and computing capabilities as per your business requirements, pay only for what you are using, and access it from anywhere, anytime. 

This is what the process is all about. It aims to make the best out of cloud technology, enhance agility, and drive innovation in your business. 

Benefits of Cloud Adoption to Businesses

Let’s explore how it can help you transform your business. 

1. Scalability 

Received a big project that requires scaling your on-premise system? You must be planning to scale your resources to meet the requirements, but what will happen after this project is completed? Your resources might get wasted and deprived! 

However, with cloud adoption, you can scale your services up or down based on your requirements, ensuring optimal resource utilization and eliminating wastage of resources. 

2. Faster Time-to-Market

You might have realized some additional challenges that your customers were facing. To address them, you want to create new services or products that resolve those issues immediately. 

However, building them on your on-premise system would require additional resources that ultimately add up to your cost, take up more space, and also require funds and efforts to market them. 

But, with cloud adoption, you can achieve faster time-to-market. The cloud offers various pre-built tools and services through which you can create and deploy your services or products faster. Plus, you get storage and computing resources that eliminate the need to purchase new hardware, saving your cost.

Your business teams can work together on the solution from anywhere, anytime, whenever needed, enhancing collaboration and ensuring quick completion. Subsequently, with the cloud, you can reach a wider range of customers across the world, launching your solution in different regions.  

3. Backup and Data Recovery  

Over your legacy system, you have to perform manual data backups and stack multiple storage devices because they are not scalable and must be purchased sequentially.

However, with cloud adoption, you do not have to indulge in manual data backup processes. It provides automatic backup after each modification you make and also allows you to schedule the process, lowering the risk of data loss. In case it occurs, cloud providers offer data recovery services so you can recover your data in minutes and get back to work without any delays.   

Besides, storing data over the cloud is much cheaper and scalable as per your requirements, so you do not have to pile up storage devices. 

4. Business Agility 

On-premise systems often restrict businesses from innovating, as scaling and upgrading them is a big concern and requires time. However, cloud adoption enables you to create new business services by leveraging advanced tools and computing services that meet the dynamic requirements of your customers. So, you can say, the need of cloud computing is everywhere! 

Additionally, it accelerates the introduction of these new services into the market. According to the G2 study, businesses that adopted the cloud saw 37% faster time to market for their new offerings.      

5. Cost-Efficiency 

Working over an on-premise system can cost you wonders! First, you need a physical space, which incurs rental costs; then you set up physical infrastructure, including assets and network setup, and then you pay for their maintenance and upgrades. 

However, adopting the cloud eliminates all these costs. Your cloud provider provides an infrastructure that includes all of the necessary components and also handles updates, ensuring that your cloud environment is up to date. Also, you only have to pay for the services you are using with the pay-as-you-go model, allowing you to allocate your financial resources to the right place. In fact, as per the G2 study, 39% of businesses achieved their cloud cost optimization goals by adopting the cloud.  

Challenges in Cloud Adoption

Despite the immense advantages that the cloud brings to your organization, it also presents certain challenges, including network compilation issues, performance challenges, cloud security threats, and more. Apart from this, here are other key challenges that you should be aware of: 

Managing Multi-Cloud Environments 

Many organizations use multiple cloud providers or tools to get the best functionalities to cater to different jobs in their business. 

For instance, a business uses Salesforce for CRM needs, GCP for advanced data analytics, and AWS for website hosting. 

Each of these cloud providers has separate systems, processes, applications, and infrastructure that complicate the management and governance. You have to delegate your focus to multiple technologies, ensuring that all are working optimally for you. 

You can either segregate your business teams focused on one technology, which increases your cost of hiring. Alternatively, you can train them to manage multiple cloud platforms, but that would require time for learning and adapting to multiple systems.  

Data Silos 

It is a big challenge, as businesses’ data is scattered across multiple environments. This segmentation makes it difficult to gain a comprehensive view of all your data in one place. Your teams might struggle to share data among them, which leads to missed insights and delays in decision-making. 

Vendor Lock-In 

Another key challenge of adopting the cloud is vendor lock-in. When you partner with a cloud provider, you are fully reliant on their technology and services. 

It might happen that your evolving needs do not align with your vendor’s offerings, which restricts your ability to innovate. This may require the need to switch to another cloud provider. However, it is not as simple as it appears. 

Switching might incur substantial costs and technical challenges related to your current architecture, reconfiguration of applications, and downtime. This is because the foundation of your current cloud provider may not align with the one you’re planning to switch to. That might become a complex process and require a high level of technical expertise. These challenges restrict businesses from shifting to another cloud vendor even when the current one lacks scaling abilities.

Knowing this, your vendor may increase prices, leading to high operational costs. If the vendor’s service quality degrades, you are stuck with the low-quality services, impacting the overall performance of your business.    

To deal with these challenges, you need to have a good cloud adoption strategy. Let’s gain an understanding of the same. 

What Is A Cloud Adoption Strategy? 

A cloud adoption strategy, also known as a cloud adoption roadmap, refers to a plan that businesses execute to ensure the success of adoption. 

This plan works as a blueprint to guide you forward with all the steps and actions required to attain the success of every cloud technology or tool you leverage in your business. It starts with analyzing your business’s current capabilities, planning the actual adoption, and then optimizing it. The strategy ensures that everything is done right and, at last, the adoption results as it should have. 

Let’s discuss the steps in detail:  

1. Initial Assessment:

The first step is to assess your business’ IT environment, including infrastructure, processes, data, and more. Then decide where the potholes are that you want to address using the cloud or why you want to adopt the cloud. What are the benefits of adopting the cloud? 

Moreover, it gives a clear idea of all the potential challenges that may arise during the process. Do market research; look for businesses that have adopted the cloud. What challenges did they face, and how did they deal with them?  

2. Planning:

After your initial assessment comes the planning stage. Here, you must focus on selecting the right cloud service provider(s) for your business. Research extensively for cloud providers in the market, gain an idea of what they serve the best, know their pricing, and compare.  

Also, plan for what tools or services you would leverage and their management practices. Draft a clear approach for choosing the best computing and deployment models. Evaluate every model and then make a decision based on what’s best for your business. 

3. Adoption:

This is the actual stage in which you adopt the cloud. By this time, you should have the necessary technical expertise and figured out the management to ensure seamless adoption. Your plan gets executed, and continuous monitoring is required to address any issues promptly.  

4. Optimization:

The process does not stop here. It requires post-implementation performance monitoring, identifying issues, and optimization to make the best of the cloud and ensure that operations run efficiently. 

Creating a cloud adoption roadmap can help you transform the above challenges into feasible solutions as you plan everything from beginning to end and work accordingly.

Case Study: How Etsy’s Cloud Adoption Strategy Accelerated Business Growth

Etsy, a global marketplace known for its creative offerings across the world, created a cloud adoption strategy so well that it resulted in improving collaboration among them while meeting their serving the evolving needs of their customers. Their focus was on three major aspects: 

Scalability: The company abandoned its traditional marketplace, in which data centers required six to nine months of prior provisioning, in favor of the cloud, which allows them to do so in a shorter period.

Sustainability: Etsy wanted to neutralize carbon footprints and save energy across their business operations. Cloud made it possible by minimizing carbon footprints with an emphasis on energy-saving by utilizing AI and ML capabilities. 

Open Culture: Etsy with its cloud provider, Google Cloud facilitated cultural sharing, enabling its team to do more than just leverage its cloud features. By eliminating the need to manage on-premise systems, Etsy’s team was now more focused on their customer’s needs, which indeed was one of their business goals. 

This strategy helped Etsy cater to every aspect of the process, gain the best out of their cloud investment, and scale their business to new heights. 

Cloud Adoption Models

When talking about adoption strategy, a part of planning requires choosing the computing and deployment models. This is important for businesses to gain an idea of whether they want to adopt the cloud fully or also leverage their on-premise systems.

These models help you strike a balance between your legacy and cloud infrastructure and gain the best of both platforms.  

Let’s discuss these models in detail:

1. Hybrid Cloud Adoption 

This model allows you to leverage both your on-premise system, i.e., your private cloud, along with a public cloud environment. 

An Everest Group survey reveals that 72% of businesses adopt the hybrid cloud model to gain the best of both platforms. They ensure full control over their sensitive data with their legacy system while leveraging the scalability and flexibility that the cloud environment offers. 

It is best suited for businesses that have invested sufficiently in resourcing their infrastructure over many years and want to continue using it. Confidential data could be saved on private servers, whereas data that requires organizational-wide access could be stored in the public cloud. Also, you can backup data over the cloud for recovery purposes. 

Moreover, business teams that find it difficult to navigate to a new environment can leverage their legacy system for regular work while boosting productivity by utilizing AI and ML offerings by the cloud. 

2. Multi-Cloud Adoption 

Reducing the risk of vendor lock-in, multi-cloud allows you to leverage the best offerings of different cloud providers. Suppose you are leveraging Google Cloud for its analytical capabilities, AWS for standard services, and Azure for Windows applications. As per a Statista report, 32% of businesses adopted a multi-cloud strategy, leveraging the best features and services of all cloud environments by distributing their workloads across multiple platforms. If one cloud faces downtime, your other workloads are unaffected and working. 

However, utilizing multiple clouds might bring challenges related to different infrastructures and data models, while combining them can be complex. To eliminate the same, consider adopting a common framework and data management layer that is compatible with all the clouds that you are using. 

3. Cloud-First

This model enables you to prioritize the use of cloud-based solutions over your traditional environment. You might be using both legacy systems as well as the cloud, but the foremost choice would be the cloud when implementing new applications or systems. Then how is it different from a hybrid model? Well, it is. 

This approach diminishes your IT burden over your legacy system and utilizes the cloud to boost productivity, cut costs, and improve service delivery. For workload execution, you would first go to the cloud, and then a legacy system would be the option.    

4. Cloud-Native 

This adoption approach focuses on developing and deploying applications that are specifically designed to gain the advantage of cloud environments. You use cloud technologies, practices, and principles to create applications that are scalable, resilient, and easily manageable by your business teams.  

It is best suited for businesses that are undergoing digital transformation, as their legacy systems would hinder innovation and scalability. Therefore, moving to the cloud-native infrastructure would provide you with scalability—up or down—and new tools and services for innovation. 

5. Cloud-Only 

As the name suggests, this adoption model focuses on utilizing the cloud as the only option for all your business requirements. You get cloud computing services—IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS—to either create new applications, leverage the infrastructure, use an existing platform, or more. All in all, the cloud has its offerings for all your needs. 

This model would be best suited for businesses that never invested in an on-premise system or only want to work over the cloud. 

Cloud Adoption Journey

As of now, you might be confused as to what is the difference between a cloud adoption journey and a cloud strategy. Well, there is. 

Adoption strategy mainly focuses on creating a plan for ensuring successful adoption, whereas journey focuses on actually moving further with the plan. 

The cloud adoption journey is a step-by-step guide depicting how your company will implement the roadmap. You must note that building the strategy is part of this journey. It includes every touchpoint or milestone you reach while moving forward with the plan.

Let’s explore the same: 

1. State Your Business Needs

The first step is to clearly state why you want to adopt the cloud. What business goal do you want to achieve by adopting the cloud?  

• Is it lowering your maintenance cost? 
• Speeding up time to market?
• Leveraging more technology to cater to a wide range of customers? 
• All-time availability of services to customers?
• Simplifying your management? And more.  

Based on your business needs, conduct a study to determine whether cloud adoption is beneficial for you or not. Will it align with your goals or not? Decide upon it and move forward. 

2. Assess Your Readiness 

Identify the applications for which you want to leverage the cloud, and also identify their dependencies so that when transferred, the dependent data comes along. Also, identify which apps need to stay on-premise and which can be retired that are of no use. 

You must identify potential risks and mitigate them as soon as possible to avoid last-minute complications. 

3. Develop a Cloud Adoption Strategy 

As already discussed, creating a strategy is crucial in the migration journey. It involves prioritizing your applications and choosing the right cloud provider. It guides you entirely through the process, ultimately maximizing the cloud outcomes. 

4. Design Your Cloud Infrastructure 

In this step, you design your cloud infrastructure. It includes designing your network configurations and operations, sourcing resources that you would need and allocating them, and storage solutions that you would require. This design should satisfy your current workload while also being scalable for future workloads that may increase. 

Make sure you have a disaster management strategy in place, as well as security measures like encryption and access controls, to prevent unauthorized third-party access to your system or network. Moreover, establish seamless connectivity between your on-premise and cloud systems through well-planned cloud migration strategies. 

In case you feel any difficulty in connecting both your systems or find the process too technical and complex, you must leverage cloud migration services from experts to ensure a seamless transition and avoid potential pitfalls.  

5. Adopt Cloud 

Now comes the step where you leverage the cloud in your business. It consists of implementing all the IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS tools that you have examined for your business processes. Either leverage them all together or one, eliminating overloading of processes and minimizing downtime of your system. Keep on monitoring the process and resolving any disruptions that occur. 

6. Post-Adoption Optimization 

After successful cloud adoption, monitor your applications and processes closely to detect any errors or performance issues. Keep on checking that your system is working efficiently and downtime is minimized. Also, choose to backup your data often so that in case any mishap occurs, you have your data restored. Moreover, ensure regulatory compliance and governance practices to avoid any legal mishaps. 

Moving forward in this journey might seem like a daunting technical task. The steps involved are technical and require expert assistance. Whether it’s building your cloud infrastructure or implementing cloud services, these tasks require specialized knowledge and skills that your business teams may not possess. Therefore, to ensure success, it’s crucial to engage with a cloud computing service provider who has the necessary expertise and skills. They access your specific requirements, recommend the right solutions, and take care of all the technicalities of your project while ensuring quality.  

Cloud Adoption Framework

It is a set of guidelines or best practices that assist you in beginning the adoption process, ensuring its optimal operation, and ultimately achieving success. 

When you plan to leverage the cloud, you may find it complex due to the technicalities involved; therefore, CAF is a guided approach to help you deal with these challenges. Plus, you can manage costs and risks, ensuring compliance. 

We have discussed frameworks for the top cloud leaders in the market: AWS, GCP, and Azure. Let’s understand them individually:

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) CAF, this framework is divided into perspectives, transformation phases, and benefits. We have briefly explained the following:

6 perspectives of AWS CAF:

• Business: Ensures that cloud investments align with business goals and drive transformation.
• People: Focuses on continuous learning and adapting to change within the organization.
• Governance: Helps manage cloud initiatives to maximize benefits while minimizing risks.
• Platform: Guides the development of scalable cloud platforms and modernization of existing applications.
• Security: Ensures that data and workloads are secure and compliant with regulations.
• Operations: Ensures that cloud services meet business needs and operate efficiently.

Transformation phases of AWS CAF: 

• Envision: Identify how the cloud can help achieve business goals and prioritize initiatives.
• Align: Assess gaps in capabilities and create strategies to improve cloud readiness.
• Launch: Implement pilot projects to demonstrate value and learn from initial experiences.
• Scale: Expand successful pilot projects and ensure ongoing benefits from cloud investments.

Benefits it offers: 

• Reduces business risks by improving reliability 
• Increases your business performance 
• Enhances system security 
• Revenue growth by allowing you to create new products and services
• Allowing you to enter new market segments 
• Increasing operational efficiency by reducing costs and improving productivity 
• Enhancing employee and customer satisfaction 

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

GCP offers four themes for ensuring cloud adoption success:

• Learn: Assess the existing knowledge and skills needed to support cloud migration. Helps identify gaps that may require external expertise.
• Lead: Emphasizes the importance of leadership support and cross-functional collaboration for successful cloud adoption.
• Scale: Evaluate the organization’s current use of cloud-native services and ability to scale cloud initiatives.
• Secure: Focuses on the organization’s capability to protect cloud services and data from security threats.

The framework also outlines three phases of cloud adoption maturity:

• Tactical: Organizations at this level want to migrate individual systems to the cloud but do not have a clear strategy. Also, the focus is on reducing costs with minimal disruption.
• Strategic: Businesses have a broader cloud strategy governing multiple systems. The focus is on future needs, scalability, and building an efficient IT team.
• Transformational: Applies to organizations with well-established cloud operations. The focus is on integrating data and tactics to transform processes and technologies.

Microsoft Azure

The Azure CAF consists of several key phases that organizations go through during cloud adoption:

• Strategy: Determine the business case and expected outcomes.
• Plan: Align adoption plans with specific business goals and outcomes.
• Ready: Set up the cloud environment for planned changes and deploy the initial practice.
• Adopt: Move existing workloads to the cloud or create new cloud-native solutions.
• Govern: Establish governance policies and controls to manage the cloud environment.
• Manage: Define operations management processes for the cloud and hybrid solutions.
• Organize: Align teams and roles supporting the cloud adoption effort.

Cloud Adoption Across Industries

Go through the use cases across multiple industries: 

1. Healthcare 

• Update patient records automatically, giving organization-wide access for easy access and retrieval. 
• Creating electronic prescriptions that could be shared 
• Remote patient monitoring could be done from anywhere, anytime, eliminating geographical hindrances.
• Storing medical images like X-rays, reports, and other documents for organizational access and sharing with customers.  
• Decision-making support for patient analysis and suggesting diagnosis and treatment options by leveraging AI
• Data backup and recovery support 

2. Retail Sector 

• Brings efficiency to inventory management by monitoring stock level updates and reordering after a certain level down. 
• Enhancing point of sale
• Prompt status update of inventory issues and mapping the cause 
• Creating e-commerce platforms to scale their operations
• Leveraging online tools such as Salesforce CRM for streamlining customer relationships. 
• Enhances supply chain visibility and collaboration between suppliers and customers 

3. Transportation and Logistics 

• Cloud solutions help you optimize routes using real-time traffic and weather conditions to optimize delivery. 
• Inventory management and updates 
• Track and manage vehicles, drivers, and shipment data in real-time. 
• Complete visibility in supply chain management 

4. Financial and Legal Sector 

• Hybrid clouds are leveraged to balance the control over sensitive data and scalability.
• Leverage cloud-based AI and analytics for offering personalized services, fraud detection, and risk modeling.
• Leverage the cloud to ensure regulatory compliance and maintain security and audit trails. 
• Supports effective disaster recovery, business continuity, and data protection. 

5. Government Sector 

• Quick backup and recovery of sensitive data.
• Supports smart city projects by integrating IoT and real-time data analytics for efficiency and resource management.
• Offers citizens services where they can use the cloud to pay their taxes, apply for permits, and other services.
• Digital transformation in government activities and processes across the nation.  

6. Telecommunication 

• Cloud-based VoIP and UC services offering cost-effective communication tools
• Telecom operators can effectively manage and scale 5G networks.
• Telecom operators are adopting cloud-native architectures to deploy network services more agilely.
• Leverage the cloud to develop new services and offerings to scale the customer base. 

7. Education 

• Educational institutions use learning management systems to host courses, track progress, and enable online learning.
• Enhances real-time collaboration between students and educators.
• Virtual class support and remote learning opportunities
• Conducts secure online exams and instant feedback. 
• Easy educational resource sharing among a large pool of students 
• Access to digital learning tools such as smart boards, whiteboards, and more 
• Robust data backup and recovery tools

Conclusion

In a world where technology is evolving rapidly, cloud adoption isn’t just a ‘if’ or ‘but’—it’s a crucial step for businesses that aim to thrive and stay ahead. 

Embracing cloud technology allows you to scale effortlessly, enhance agility, and cut down on unnecessary costs, ensuring you are always ready to meet changing market demands.

But adopting the cloud is more than just a shift to new technology. It’s about integrating advanced solutions that drive innovation into your business. For instance, combining AI and cloud computing can open new doors of opportunities for your business. It can work up your data like never before, helping you make data-driven decisions and empowering growth plus scalability. 

Want to leverage the power of the cloud in your business? But is it too complicated or technical to begin with? Connect with a cloud consulting firm. Their experts help you transit to the cloud easily and effectively. The future is in the cloud—let’s get you ready for it.