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The Cloud Transformation Maturity Model - Common Customer Journeys

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Duration1h 4m
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Course Description:

Intended Audience:

Learning Objectives:

  • Identify the benefits of migrating to the cloud.
  • Describe the six common migration strategies used in cloud migrations. 


This course includes:



- [Instructor] Let's now explore the stages we see in the cloud maturity adoption cycle. The first phase is the project phase. In the project phase, you may be running projects to get familiar with cloud services. There is generally limited knowledge of cloud services in the business. This stage is often evidenced by limited ownership or direction evident in the organization. Projects tend to be one-off, potentially run by individuals often operating on their own. In our customer example expertiseplease.com, two people from the operations team have been running tests using Amazon S3 as object storage. They have tested posting objects through Amazon S3 and retrieving them using application calls from their current application. The team members set up an AWS account themselves and while the tests were sanctioned and supported by their sysops team lead, they have been experimenting without a lot of support from the business at this stage. The team had reported back to their sysops team lead on the success they had with using Amazon S3 storage for image objects as a proof of concept. So how can you tell if an organization is at this project stage? Well, a good way to determine the level of experimentation is to run a brief and informal interview with internal teams and ask if they have been experimenting, what they did and what they found out. Try suggesting the idea of them running some proof of concepts to test out the various cloud platforms and gauge their interest and feedback. You can consolidate results into a simple one-pager that summarizes the level of experimentation that appears to exist in the business to date, and that can form a blueprint for further discussions and experimentation. The second phase we see is the foundation stage. So after experiencing the ease of use of cloud services, we often see customers start building the foundations required for cloud adoption. For expertiseplease.com, the operations team lead reported back to the executive on the success of the Amazon S3 proof of concept and asked the executive for support for setting up a structured cloud migration project. At this foundation stage, we might see a corporate or consolidated account being set up and ownership of security and compliance readiness may be evident in some teams. However, this is just as likely to be an unaddressed requirement, and there may be concerns around security and compliance, mainly because the required resources and roles have not been formalized yet. This generally is the result of not having a transformation plan in place. There may be some frustrations and negativity associated with migration projects underway as a result of this. So how can I tell if an organization is at the foundation stage? Well, asking to see the transformation plan can be a great litmus test for defining how far an organization is into this foundation stage. If that plan doesn't exist yet, it is still early days and there is work to be done in getting that transformation plan underway. The third phase we see is the migration stage, and this is where organizations have made the commitment to migrating workloads or to cloud services. And in this stage, there may be some lift and shift of existing applications. Even mission-critical applications or entire data centers could be shifted to the cloud. And projects may be happening independently and somewhat randomly. However, that is not always the case. For expertiseplease.com, they're entering the migration stage, and to get to the stage required the sysops team lead to run a number of cloud-readiness workshops. There were some external influences that helped. The CEO attended a number of executive briefings on business agility and cloud providers provided some proof of concept funding and architecture workshops. The net result is that the executives have committed to transforming the business and the project is owned and supported by the CEO. The key business driver for committing to the migration project, however, is that fixed constraint. The operations team identified that the data center storage was near exhaustion, so something had to be done. How can you tell if an organization has reached this point? You'll know if an organization has reached this point if third-party providers are presenting proposals or there are already a series of migration projects underway. So the next stage is reinvention. And once the majority of business operations are in the cloud, a customer can begin to focus on reinventing by taking advantage of the flexibility and capabilities of cloud providers and using those to transform their business by speeding up time to market and increasing the attention on innovations. For expertiseplease.com, this is a plan to decouple the monolithic business application and redevelop it to use microservices running on managed services. Now, this will enable the various components of the application workload to scale up and down as required. And for the business, it means they can implement new features and functions without having to redeploy an entire application stack. How can I tell if your organization is at this stage? So this phase we'll often see a number of optimizations underway. There's operational efficiencies coming from running in a cloud environment. However, they may not have leveraged the full benefits yet. Okay, so those are our four key stages. So how do we move a customer from one of these stages to the next?

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