5 Stages of Cloud Adoption

The cloud can help cut costs and increase flexibility, but building out a mature environment takes time. Here are the five stages companies go through.

Teams within organizations move to the cloud to increase agility and velocity of feature delivery. Usually, they migrate initial workloads for test and development, but soon relocate production workloads as well.

At some point, typically about a year after initial cloud adoption, the organization realizes that the increased agility and velocity come at the cost of greater management complexity, with the side effect of reduced visibility into costs and cost drivers.

In an effort to reduce cloud costs and increase visibility into cost drivers, IT teams will kick off cloud optimization projects. For example, the team may want to categorize assets by department so they can chargeback or inventory costs. Because of the dynamic nature of the cloud, however, cost allocation needs to be an ongoing process, rather than a one-time analysis.

Once costs are under control, improved visibility and automation must be used to tackle broader cloud complexity. Improved visibility means having a single place that shows the health of the cloud infrastructure while maximizing information flow to enable decentralized decision-making. Once visibility is addressed, more tasks can be automated to reduce management complexity, and minimize human—manual—workflows.

Invariably, organizations hit a stage where cloud adoption matures beyond initial experimentation and is used for mission-critical workloads and assets. At this stage, cloud service management is crucial to extract the true benefits of the cloud and make cloud operations manageable.