Cloud adoption is the process of integrating cloud services into an organization’s IT infrastructure.

Do you want to adopt the cloud? How? And, adopting or migrating? Are you starting to have some doubts? Perfect, this page has been written for you!

You should start thinking that, according to Gartner, a good percentage of organizations planning to adopt the cloud are going to experience dissatisfactions. So better being prepared.

Cloud adoption VS cloud migration

Cloud migration is the technical process of moving data from on-premises servers to the cloud. Cloud adoption is the broader integration of cloud technology into business operations.

How to? Adoption patterns

Looking at the previous definition, we can imagine there are different ways to adopt the cloud. And not necessarily requiring a migration. In this section, we are going to see main adoption patterns.

Lift and Shift

Consists in moving solutions to the cloud, maintaining existing solutions with little or no change. It is quick, ideal for standard component like databases or applications easily containerized. But, not all architectures are fit for cloud, with conseguent risk to significantly increase operational costs, if used on components not designed for that paradigm.

Cloud first

Consists in establishing a policy that all new IT development by default will be on cloud. It is easy to get started and can lead to quick improvements. But can bifurcate the technology organization.

Offload

Consists in extending on-premise infrastructure to provide on-demand access. It is quick, ideal for standard components like databases, virtual machines, and so on. But it is limited to extending what already exists, and may not lead to culture change.

Regional autonomy

Consists in letting each business unit taking autonomous decisions, converging on interfaces and cloud approaches. It is faster to be implementated, and facilitate commitment to the cloud. But at the price of possible duplications and waste of resources.

Incremental change

It is implementd by ranking projects where cloud could be used, starting with easier ones. It is ideal to start facing obstacles and to build momentum and confidence. But it is slow, and may lead to doubts about cloud adoption.

Anarchy

Yes, it is a valid approach. Consists in giving access to cloud services and let development teams work as they prefer. It helps idea generation and quick solution delivery, at the cost of lacking robust operations and production-grade workload, increasing the technical debt.

Experimental

It identifies a cloud vendor that can be accessed for testing purpose, allowing teams to use it. It is good to start building expertise, but it has to be clear that it is just a playground if not done organically.

Conclusion

Cloud adoption can be the result of the implementation of one or more patterns. A pure cloud native environment, where everthing is made to run in the cloud, may not be the intended result. At the end there are several reasons not to run everything on it. But anyway, we should consider that we will need several steps, also for a limited adoption. The following diagram shows what can be the road to the cloud adoption.