Cloud Adoption Maturity Model: A Curtain-Raiser

Building a cloud adoption strategy has become a crucial boardroom agenda for modern enterprises. It isn’t hard to understand why.

In the fight against COVID-19, the cloud has been mobilized in a number of ways to ensure resilience. The technology has been instrumental in enabling the work-from-home transition, moving learning online, and reinforcing data security among more. 

MariaDB Corporation, in a global survey conducted in June 2020, revealed that over 40% of global enterprises had plans of accelerating their move to the cloud while 51% were pushing more applications in the cloud. An IDC survey indicated an uptake of 64% in adopting cloud and SaaS-based applications across Indian Inc. due to COVID-19. Gartner forecasted that the market size of the cloud industry is expected to be three times the growth of overall IT services through 2022.

The Cloud adoption has reached an inflection point and is poised for bigger things if numbers are anything to go by. But, every rose has its thorn.

Cloud Adoption Strategy: Where do enterprises lose their way, and what is the solution?

Too often, enterprises are failing to come up with an effective leverage strategy for the Cloud Management. Driven by urgency posed by COVID-19, leaders are acting with haste and selecting lift-and-shift approaches that don’t render the expected results. 

By lift-and-shift, we mean approaches concerned with moving applications to the cloud instead of addressing significant and far-reaching needs of the business culture transformation.

Some enterprises are promising the sky but underestimating the amount of work needed. On realizing it, they are halting the migration process before they can get to the point of harnessing the true value of the cloud. As a result, they are getting exposed to substantial operational and financial risks.

While the scenario isn’t new, it does beg a question—what can prevent enterprises from losing their way when it comes to the cloud adoption strategy? 

The answer lies in referring to a comprehensive, structured migration model.

Understanding the Cloud Adoption Maturity model: meaning and objectives

Mastering the cloud adoption strategy needs enterprises to be aware of various points of entry, supply chain dynamics, and potential gaps. 

The Cloud Adoption Maturity Model is a framework defining solutions to leverage, capabilities to gain, and challenges to solve, across different stages of adopting the cloud. It represents a roadmap for enterprises to implement for achieving certain levels of maturity and addressing targeted business use cases in due course.

Alternatively, the Cloud Adoption Maturity Model is useful for helping enterprises benchmark performance against peers in the industry and determining whether the progress is made on the right track. 

Four levels of Cloud Adoption Maturity

Achieving cloud adoption maturity isn’t a sprint to the finish. It’s a cohesive, well-orchestrated journey that safely gets enterprises across the last stop to reap the rewards. 

Kellton categorizes the maturity model into four stages: 

1. The Greenhorn Stage
   The first step usually involves adopting a storage solution. Applications and systems of a less critical nature are stored as an experiment to see how the cloud works. A small team performs stand-alone migrations, and complex IT requirements such as those related to servers aren’t catered to.
   
   The Challenges of the ‘Greenhorns’
   •    Shortage of skills
   •    Limited awareness
   •    No sense of direction
   •    Less confidence
2. The Apprentice Stage
   During the Apprentice stage, the focus builds on something far more fundamental—replacing on-premise servers and moving more workload into the cloud, rapidly and securely, in a lift-and-shift exercise. This is when enterprises come to leverage the actual benefits of the cloud—higher flexibility, better efficiency, and reduced IT costs among more. The enterprise architecture is restructured to bring in new application visibility and monitoring capabilities that could help leaders keep track of their cloud resources in real-time.
   
   The Challenges of the ‘Apprentices’
   •    No effective roadmap
   •    Downtime and performance loss
   •    Security and compliance concerns
   •    Migration of all targeted applications
3. The Practitioner Stage 
   At the ‘practitioner’ stage, the dynamic cloud becomes one of the building blocks of an organization’s DNA. Enterprises seek to derive advantage of some of the technology’s value-added services. They plan on implementing managed databases, build CI/CD pipelines based on DevOps, and use automatic scaling tools for turning their cloud investments more profitable. It’s when the enterprises usher into a dynamic cloud ecosystem. Ahead on their journey, they decide on making the most out of the hyperscalers and maximize the return on cloud investments. These include serverless computing solutions, data warehouses, and queuing and notification services, among more. 
   
   The Challenges of the ‘Practitioners’
   •    Inability to identify the right resources
   •    Cost constraints
   •    Governance and control
   •    Multiple resource management

4. The Role Model Stage
   This is the nirvana stage, characterized by thoroughbred cloud capabilities addressing most, if not all, of the data center needs. All new applications run in the cloud as a default practice, and data centers are offloaded to manage other priorities, if any. This is common with enterprises choosing to retain legacy systems for a while. Cloud Management Organizations are the ultimate role-models, which decide to let go of their traditional data centers to reap the cutting-edge innovation benefits and grow extensively for achieving a leg-up over the competition. 
   
   The Challenges of the ‘Role-Models’ 
   •    Enterprise service optimization
   •    Legacy system modernization
   •    Cloud security 
   •    Management rigor

Cloud Adoption Maturity: The goal is not to be perfect, but relevant

Implementing cloud capabilities across the fabric of a business is a long haul. To do it successfully, it’s essential to note that the continuum of cloud maturity exists. However, maturity doesn’t come to all in equal proportions. Every business is unique, and it must understand its organic position across the maturity curve, along with the implications. Based on its size and culture, any enterprise can fall short of achieving the gold standard, and it’s alright. 

Scale to the ultimate Cloud Maturity with Kellton

Kellton brings years of experience in Enterprise Cloud Implementation. We develop cutting-edge strategies to help clients build, operate, and manage business in the cloud and fuel Digital Transformation goals with greater agility and flexibility

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