Cloud Journey: the 5 steps to nailing digital transformation

Post • 3 min read

Many organisations recognise that becoming more agile is vital to a successful digital transformation. This agility comes hand in hand with the cloud, but businesses find it challenging to find the right operational model for leveraging this.

Getting the most out of the investment into public cloud requires changing or adjusting many aspects of work outside of technology. Supporting this cloud journey is the core focus of Nordcloud’s Consultancy & Advisory services. Our cloud advisory services have been built around the common experiences and customer needs which we have seen in hundreds of public cloud projects we’ve undertaken since 2011. We also work and in close co-operation with the hyper-scale professional service, like those of AWS, Azure and GCP. These experiences we have refined into the method we call Cloud Journey.

The 5 steps of Cloud Journey

Our five-step process is an approach which is both in line with industry best practices and based on our real-life experiences from real projects. 1. Strategy Strategy is about setting and validating the goals and high-level roadmap for your organisation’s cloud journey. Our services for this phase include cloud strategy projects, vision workshops, and building directional business cases for cloud adoption. We also help with identify the capabilities needed for reaching those goals. 2. Foundation For us, foundation is about both the technology and the organisation and processes for public cloud. In practice, this means defining things like a cloud governance model, the role of cloud competence centre, defining policies, security controls and the scope for the cloud core infrastructure in terms of tooling and architecture (for example networks and accounts). 3. Innovation Innovation means taking full advantage of the capabilities of the public cloud and being able to quickly build new solutions for your business needs. For this, Nordcloud offers help with design services, setting up DevOps practices and in taking advantage of the data related possibilities of cloud. 4. Migration Migration focuses on ensuring the existing application portfolio is also treated to the benefits of cloud. A typical advisory service would be (for example) planning the migration project, assessing the application portfolio for migration (6R analysis), or building a detailed business case for migration. We also help customers lead the transformation of their IT assets and organisation as cloud migration is different from a data centre migration and the work does not stop with the completion of the migration project. 5. Optimisation After migration, optimisation helps with the transformation of ways of working, as does refactoring applications and improving the cloud core infrastructure itself. The goal for optimisation is ensuring cloud produces the needed business outcomes. Typical services could include cost optimisation services and best practice reviews, or for example, helping define and implement the next steps in the evolution of customer’s cloud centre of excellence. By working exclusively with the public cloud, we aim at maximising value for our customers. With this is mind, the goal for our advisory services is to produce actionable, practical recommendations.

Cloud advisory and strategy at Nordcloud

Our Cloud Enablement Services help your organisation to take advantage of the public cloud. We have a number of cloud advisors at Nordcloud, who are on hand to assist our customers with their journey to the cloud.

Ready to get started on your cloud journey? Contact our cloud experts here!

Lauri HalkosaariHead of Consulting
CloudCloud

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Ilja Summala
Ilja Summala LinkedIn
CTO
Ilja’s passion and tech knowledge help customers transform how they manage infrastructure and develop apps in cloud.