Get Cloud Adoption right in 2025 with a Strategic Roadmap

As we move through the first quarter of the new year, we’re in a critical juncture for businesses to start putting their 2025 IT strategy into action. Amongst a range of priorities from cyber security to AI adoption, cloud migration remains a consistent feature on countless to-do lists. But the challenge comes in transitioning cloud projects from idea to implementation. 

While many organisations will already have some exposure to cloud, potentially adopting SaaS solutions or other cloud services, they will also still have some legacy, on-premises workloads that are potential candidates for migration. It may be tempting to have one eye on post-cloud migration, but choosing the best opportunities and following through on a potential project successfully, firstly requires careful consideration and strategic planning, all of which helps form an effective cloud roadmap. 

Building your roadmap 

Step 1 – Attain stakeholder buy-in 

As a first step, it’s vital to set clear objectives that you hope to achieve through cloud migration – not just in terms of moving a certain percentage of your environment, but in terms of the business goals that your new cloud environment should help you achieve. 

Cloud migration projects are usually led by IT teams, but they impact the entire business. As such, it’s important to discuss your plans with key stakeholders from across the organisation, and make sure they have the chance to weigh in at appropriate junctures.  

Building a plan with their insights in mind helps to ensure business success, and avoid any potential IT blind spots. They may even be able to point you in the direction of cloud services they’d like to be able to leverage, helping set objectives for success beyond purely technical metrics. 

Once stakeholders are in agreement and objectives are set, make sure to set clear benchmarks in order to measure progress, and assess successes later down the line. 

Step 2 – Choose your workload 

Once objectives are set, the next priority is identifying which workloads to prioritise. While technical considerations are vital, it’s just as important to take a wider view and understand how a given application interacts with the wider IT environment, and how it supports key business goals. Weigh up the following factors to spot prime candidates for cloud migration: 

• Criticality: While every application and workload plays a role within your business, their importance is far from equal. The criticality of a particular application is a key consideration. Moving your accounting application for example may reduce costs and unlock new functionality, but the potential risks and possible downtime need to be considered as part of any analysis. 

• Security: Applications with special security or compliance requirements may need special accommodations in the cloud. Anything in the cloud is, by definition, accessible to users who aren’t on-premises, and while cloud providers ensure their environments are secure, workloads with stringent security requirements may be better off on-prem, at least until you’re confident in the cloud. 

• Age: While more modern applications are typically cloud-ready, older applications don’t have the same privilege. As such, it may be better to migrate newer apps first with simple rehosting migrations to build your cloud environment. Equally, migrating a legacy app may be a modernisation priority, but this may incur additional costs to prepare this for the cloud. 

• Dependencies: Many of your applications will have interconnected relationships with other third-party sources, or even applications within your estate, and these must be considered as part of any future migration. Understanding underlying dependencies can help you prioritise migration steps. 

• Business impact: In order for your cloud to deliver on the objectives set in Step 1, it should go without saying that you’ll need to migrate applications that will have a bearing on these goals. Moving your payroll to the cloud may be an easy win, but it won’t be much help if you’re hoping to improve the performance of an eCommerce application, for example. 

Step 3: Your action plan 

Once you’ve identified your candidate workloads for cloud migration, the next step is determining what that move will look like – different applications will benefit from different methods of migration. Determining your route to the cloud ahead of time helps to reduce friction when the time comes to execute on your plan and helps ensure any supporting resources aligned correctly. There are countless options depending on your chosen cloud environment, but most of these fall under the broad strokes of these three categories: 

• Rehosting: Rehosting is the simplest route to the cloud – usually referred to as a “lift and shift” migration. It’s exactly what you might expect – simply take the application and relocate it to your chosen cloud infrastructure, with few to no changes. For less complex applications, this is an easy win, and it’s often the best way to kick-start a wider cloud migration project. 

• Rearchitecting: While rehosting works well for simple applications, older or more complex workloads tend to require substantive changes to truly benefit from the cloud environment. This is where rearchitecting comes in - rebuilding an application from the ground up to make use of the benefits of cloud, such as automatic scaling or flexible microservices architectures. This delivers far more value from the cloud, but often comes at a premium, meaning it’s best to rearchitect workloads sparingly. 

• Replacing: Not every application is destined for cloud greatness – it may be better to simply replace them with an already cloud-native SaaS application. Many software vendors have built their own cloud services, and leveraging these instead of managing the application yourself can help to reduce costs and improve your posture in the cloud. 

Step 4: Delivering your roadmap 

A successful cloud migration requires careful planning and execution around multiple moving parts. Throughout the process, keep a close eye on your objectives, and solicit feedback from across the business to ensure your cloud becomes a success. 

It’s also worth considering the benefit of bringing in expertise from a trusted IT partner. Our technical experts can work alongside your IT team to ensure a smooth execution of cloud migration projects or conduct a Cloud Readiness Assessment to ensure that your own roadmap can be followed without a hitch. 

Ready to advance your cloud migration in 2025? Get in touch with us today to discuss your plans, and how we can help you execute on them.