In our fourth and final segment of our Cloud Transformation for IT Leaders series, we will focus on driving enterprise velocity while maintaining best practices and consistency as your portfolio migration program matures. If done well, this is where your organization achieves true cloud maturity and is on its way to unlocking the incredible innovation possible with modern cloud, including data & analytics, AI / ML and automation – and lowering capital investments in data centers, support vendors and licensing commitments.

If you are just joining us, please check out our previous blogs on the building blocks of a successful cloud transformation program: building a Cloud Program Model, getting your Cloud Foundations right, and designing a Portfolio Transformation approach.

Now that your cloud strategy, business objectives, governance and baseline infrastructure are in place, it’s all about enabling your product teams to be successful in delivering business value – and that means meeting them where they are in their transformation journey. Working with a partner like Perficient provides immense value during this period to maintain momentum, build organizational buy-in, and work through common challenges.

A strategic partner is your thought-leader to:

Provide perspective on the journey ahead
Reinforce best practices and guidance
Demonstrate a reference approach
Inform overall planning and timing
Value the impact of change management
Provide baseline guidance for self-sufficient teams
Provide white-glove peering for novice teams
Evangelize standards and patterns
Embrace pilots and prototypes to inform decisions
Enable global delivery with confidence
Ensure consistent program oversight and visibility

As velocity increases, your goal should be to make intelligent decisions for every workload while staying inside the guardrails of your program strategy. Enable your teams to leverage architectures and services that suit their needs – and provide guidance and support to them where it is needed.  There is a lot to consider! (See more below)

 

Streamlining Your Application Strategy for Successful Enterprise Migration

Almost certainly, your organization has evolved with a wide range of technology platforms, operating systems, programming languages, DevOps tools and hosting models. You’ve probably acquired a few companies along the way and folded those solutions in as best you can in a challenging environment.  You’ve modernized and innovated, but likely not consistently across your portfolio. And that’s ok – you are not alone.

Portfolio migration is a perfect time to simplify your ecosystem and eliminate technical debt and regret.  And while there isn’t enough funding, time, resources or business value to consider rewriting everything, you can make smart decisions per-solution on what is the best approach moving forward.  You can study the 5Rs below but what really matters in the end is focusing on the problems you are trying to solve and making informed decisions from there. A leading concept to help simplify this is: Are you focused on gradual improvement while maintaining existing business value, or targeting total replacement of a solution?  The following guide may provide insight on this decision process:

From Planning to Execution: Maximizing Velocity for Enterprise Migration

As your per-workload decision structure evolves, you are going to build confidence in your approach, gain buy-in from your architecture & security teams, your Cloud COE, and your product teams – and velocity will start to increase across modernization tracks. A pilot phase can be helpful in getting the first migrations off the ground but remember you don’t have to be perfect to be successful. Use learnings from early phases as feedback to future phases. Did you find security issues? Hardcoded config values? Unknown dependencies? Poor software health? See these as silver linings – and use this information to improve your estimates, planning and process for future workloads.

 

Achieving Operational Excellence Through Intelligent Enterprise Migration

As the program progresses towards steady-state solutions, it’s essential to ensure that program leadership collaborates on management processes and delivery standards. Regular reporting, communication, and change management coordination are crucial for smooth enterprise adoption, migration, and transition. Additionally, embrace automation and quality assurance improvements, invest in monitoring and observability tooling across infrastructure, network, applications, and data to inform operational oversight. It’s also important to revisit the FinOps and cost optimization strategy actively and tune resources to maximize investment. Finally, explore ways to report on sustainability scores and improve them as part of your existing or future ESG program.

The Conclusion (Or the Beginning?) of Your Enterprise Migration Journey

We’ve come a long way in this process, and we’ve covered a comprehensive approach to designing, executing, and accelerating an entire enterprise cloud modernization program. To be successful takes committed buy-in, a willingness to look hard at existing processes and investments, daily collaboration across internal teams, and an ecosystem of vendors and partners. It’s certainly a journey, but the impacts are long-lasting and provide real and sustainable value to your enterprise for decades to come. Thank you for taking this journey with us!

For more in-depth solutions for IT leaders, we highly recommend checking out our free guide called the “VP of IT’s Guide to Transforming Your Business.” This guide provides further insights on how to achieve success in cloud strategy, data, DevOps, and product development to set your organization up for continued growth and success.

Happy Transformation!