The Doppler Quarterly Summer 2019 | Page 27

How to get past obstacles and avoid roadblocks stalling your cloud journey. Cloud transformations are often referred to as “journeys,” with starting points and rea- sonably well-defined destinations. They begin with assessments, plans, foundational initiatives and workload migrations. The journeys do not officially have an endpoint, but successful ones do eventually arrive at a place where organizations fully embrace auto- mation, and follow a right mix approach, where cloud is a viable option in their active portfolio. Somewhere along this continuum, between adopting and scaling, cloud journeys can take some interesting, sometimes awkward, sometimes inspirational turns. It is when the rubber hits the road and organizations begin to truly start leveraging the power of the cloud that they gain the most confidence and speed. But if organizations are not careful, this stretch can introduce any number of issues, causing the team to lose their way, make mistakes and miss both internally � and exter- nally - imposed deadlines. They can lose focus on the overall transformation plan – and on the stakeholders responsible for executing portions of the plan. This stage is an important part of the journey that organizations must navigate through. How do you know if you are on the right track to success? What are the signs that you are stuck, and struggling to make progress? What does success look like at this point in your cloud journey? And what can you do to make sure you stay pointed in the right direction? One way you can check your organization’s progress is to evaluate the current state of your cloud adoption initiative according to four basic criteria: the establishment of a DevOps culture, data gravity, economics and innovation. Are you meeting your objec- tives in these four areas? Are you following best practices and pushing each area to the point where you can safely say that you can see your desired destination? Let us take a closer look at how each of these measures applies. SUMMER 2019 | THE DOPPLER | 25