Founded on our research with Deloitte Consulting LLP, we developed a four-part blog series. In part one, we provided an overview of the current state of enterprise cloud adoption, and part two, we explored the key players driving this evolution.
Read on for part three, where we look at the different paths organizations take to the cloud, their motivating use cases, and the challenges they face along the way.
There are two separate pathways that organizations have taken to cloud adoption, depending on whether they are early or late adopters.
No matter when an organization makes the move, successful public cloud adoption typically starts with a use case driven approach and a careful consideration of why the enterprise is adopting.
Early adopters began with single public clouds
Early adopters of the cloud initially moved to a single public cloud, driven by three key use cases:
1. Infrastructure refresh or exit
Teams Involved: IT Infrastructure
Common drivers for migration to a single public cloud are the completion of hardware refresh cycles, data center closure or contract expiration. These migrations typically take the form of a lift and shift approach to non-critical apps.
2. Scale on demand
Teams Involved: IT Infrastructure, DevOps
Many enterprises adopt a hybrid cloud approach to take advantage of on-demand scalability. This allows them to use additional capacity during temporary or seasonal spikes in demand. Being able to scale usage up and down as they need enables cost savings and reduces downtime.
3. Innovation and agile development
Teams Involved: IT Infrastructure, DevOps
Competitiveness in the modern marketplace is determined by the ability to innovate and ship products, services and features at speed. LoB developers are adopting single public clouds to develop cloud-native apps to meet this need.
They then expanded to the multi-cloud
Following the adoption of single public clouds, early adopters often expanded to a multi-cloud infrastructure for innovation, risk management, or due to mergers and acquisitions:
4. Innovation and agile development
Teams Involved: DevOps, Cloud Operations
Different apps have different requirements, and LoB developers are often driven to adopt multiple public cloud providers for differentiated capabilities. For example, many enterprises work with Google Cloud for their machine learning and AI capabilities.
5. Cloud risk reduction
Teams Involved: IT Infrastructure, Cloud Operations
Enterprises choose to adopt multiple clouds to manage risk in a number of ways. Avoiding vendor lock-in provides benefits to disaster recovery and an enterprise’s purchasing power.
6. Mergers and acquisitions
Teams Involved: IT Infrastructure, DevOps, Cloud Operations
Many enterprises inherit cloud environments from mergers and acquisitions. Divestment can also prompt architecture changes, such as the need to shift workloads.
On late adopters
Unlike early adopters, late cloud adopters are far more likely to move directly to a multi-cloud, motivated by one or more of the above use cases.
Stay tuned for part four of the series, where we’ll explore the four main challenges enterprises face when adopting the cloud.
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