Experts discuss tips for modernizing the cloud

After organizations are finished moving their applications to the cloud, some still struggle to see the end user or business process benefits from all these effort. Moving applications and data from on-premises to the Cloud doesn’t always stay on track.

KMWorld recently held a webinar with Doug Johnson, vice president of product management at ASG Technologies and Ryan McVeigh, Managing Partner at Zia Consulting, who discussed best practices that will help enterprises construct and implement successful cloud strategies.

According to Johnson, roadmap drivers that underlie the move to modernizing the cloud include:

• Faster time-to-market while reducing IT debt and costs
• Managing sensitive information while empowering processes
• Improving productivity via business automation and integration
• Delighting customers, partners, and employees on any device or context
• Creating intelligence to reduce costs, risks, and engage users

However there are 4 challenges hindering cloud modernization. Within organizations there is a lack of prioritization of which applications move to the cloud. Enterprises are missing a coherent strategy to reuse existing data and retire systems. Some companies oversimplify connections/customizations between systems or fail to raise compliance levels while achieving agility.

Before moving projects into a modernized cloud, organizations should consider answering these questions:

• Where are you on the spectrum of cloud and managed services?
• In considering cost, are you comparing apples to apples?
• What is your level of expertise?
• Have you revisited your corporation’s information security policies?
• Are you differentiating between cloud native and SaaS?
• Will you need a hybrid model during migration?
• Don’t forget about your bandwidth.

Business Agility is one of the biggest goals of the cloud, Johnson and McVeigh said. Having control over data like California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is more important than ever—especially in the cloud.

Plans for modernization for the cloud should include a strategy that brings together new experiences with existing systems, be built upon efficient business processes that seamlessly realize information flows by reducing human efforts and streamlining interactions, and understand where sensitive information lives and apply policies wherever information may live.

An archived on-demand replay of this webinar is available here.