How Data and Analytics Can Guide your Move to the Cloud

The question about cloud migration is not whether to do to it, it’s how to do it. Determining what to move to the cloud requires finding the most appropriate and efficient delivery model for each application. For many enterprises, this will result in a hybrid, multi-cloud approach in which applications and workloads are matched with the right service delivery model depending on how they are used.

Cloud migrations are seldom all-or-nothing propositions, and an effective cloud strategy requires more than instinct. IT leaders need to have confidence in their IT and financial data, a means to measure the return on their investment, performance metrics for service providers and alignment between IT and the rest of the business. Without clear internal and external visibility, cloud initiatives are at risk of failure. Technology Business Management (TBM)—the discipline for managing IT investments across an enterprise—fills that gap, allowing the enterprise to better understand in which instances moving to the cloud makes sense and what the benefits will be.

Two of the biggest challenges in designing an optimal cloud strategy are a lack of information and poor-quality information. Making decisions about how and where to run applications requires complete visibility and clean data—and TBM delivers the tools to do both.

Collecting data is only the first step. Data is not useful if it is not analyzed, and before it can be analyzed, it has to be clean and validated. The potential for “dirty data” looms large for enterprises that don’t have a systematic way to validate it.

The discipline of TBM exposes processes that are vulnerable to error, including data migrations, undocumented changes, human error, and external or siloed data that has not been captured. When a company knows where problems are likely to arise, they can more easily resolve data-quality issues, even when the volume of data may seem overwhelming.

Finding the right delivery model for applications is part of a transformation that shifts the role of IT from being a builder of technology to being a broker and a guardian of technology services, whether those services are provisioned in-house or through the cloud. When companies have insight into different areas of IT performance, they can use that information to transform the IT organization and execute the cloud strategy that is right for them.

Read this ISG white paper, TBM Market Insights: Looking Ahead with Data Analytics and Cloud Strategy, and contact me to discuss how TBM can help transform your organization.

About the author

Alex-Paul works closely with enterprise leaders, IT finance managers and IT business unit leaders to help implement the discipline of Technology Business Management (TBM) into their organizations and optimize their enterprise IT. He advises both commercial and public sector organizations on the adoption of TBM programs, designs fact-based analytical strategies and supports broader IT transformation initiatives. His development of a strategic TBM multi-dimensional framework addressing people, process, data, analytics, technology and strategy is part of ISG’s industry-leading set of market best practices and methodologies. His thought leadership has been featured in CIO Review, MiddleMarket Executive and the TBM Council’s book The Four Value Conversations CIOs Must Have with Their Businesses.