If, like many others, your organization is currently moving its IT estates to the cloud, no doubt you’re looking forward to major cost savings and other benefits. However, success in achieving these benefits has some critical dependencies, the first of which is your ability to get an accurate, “deep dive” understanding of your organization’s existing IT estate and usage data, so that you can optimize and move what you need, rather than what you have. If you don’t invest enough time in preparation and planning, you will struggle to realize the full benefits.

Failure to make these investments probably lies behind some recent survey findings suggesting that cloud migration often produces disappointing results in terms of cost, with inevitable implications for return on investment. For example, a North American study¹ by Softchoice found that 57% of IT leaders have exceeded their cloud budgets at some point – a third of them by more than 20%.

Common causes of problems include inadequate understanding of the current operating environment, particularly infrastructure configuration and the application portfolio; failure to adequately analyze usage patterns for hardware, software and services; and difficulty in selecting the most appropriate configuration from potentially millions of possibilities available from cloud providers. Given the on-demand nature of cloud, any of these issues can mean that you end up paying for more resources than you need, without necessarily getting the service level that you want.

Scalable’s Asset Intelligence platform, Asset Vision, gives you the accurate, comprehensive and granular information you need to avoid these pitfalls. But whatever tools you choose, we suggest you guide your journey to the cloud by working through the six questions below. Questions 1 to 6 can be answered one at a time, but cost management should be revisited at every step.

With preparation, you can enjoy a smooth move to the cloud and, equally importantly, continue to deliver full value months and years after the initial move. In this blog series, I’ll provide pointers for actions you can take at each stage to ensure success during and after your migration, before outlining how Scalable can help.

¹ Softchoice: The State of Cloud Readiness, Fall 2018: IT leaders are lost in the cloud