The cloud offers tremendous benefits, from cost savings and efficiency gains to enhanced innovation and collaboration.

But migrating isn’t as simple as lifting and shifting to the cloud. Organizations need to assess their readiness across a number of dimensions to ensure a successful move.

This comprehensive cloud assessment examines key factors to consider before leaping.

Security And Compliance

Security is an enterprise’s top concern in the cloud. Assessing your security and compliance needs is essential for determining the right cloud approach.

Identifying security requirements

What are your security priorities? Consider factors like:

• Data protection needs – encryption, access controls, logging/auditing
• Network security needs – firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention
• Identity and access management
• Security monitoring and response
• Compliance needs – regulations, standards
• Threat landscape – likely attacks and vulnerabilities

Rank your priorities to shape security capabilities in the cloud. This process is often assisted by cloud assessment services that evaluate all aspects of readiness for new infrastructure.

Cloud security responsibilities

Cloud security is a shared responsibility between you and your provider. Understand who handles what across SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS models.

• SaaS – provider secures underlying infrastructure and operations. You manage data, identities, and devices.
• PaaS – provider secures lower stack while you secure apps, data, runtimes, and identities.
• IaaS – you manage OSes, networks, runtimes, data, and identities. Provider protects underlying cloud.

Assess any gaps between provider offerings and your needs.

Compliance planning

Factor compliance into your cloud security assessment. Identify regulations and standards you must adhere to, like HIPAA, PCI DSS, or GDPR. Understand requirements around data controls, auditing, geographic restrictions, and more. Choose compliant cloud providers and account for any additional controls you’ll need to implement.

Integration With Existing Landscape

The cloud doesn’t exist in isolation. Assessing integration needs is vital for unlocking the cloud’s full potential while avoiding creating silos.

Application and data integration

Take stock of your application portfolio and data landscape. Consider:

• Which apps and data stores need integration with cloud services?
• Any legacy constraints around integrating on-premises apps?
• API and microservices capabilities to connect cloud and on-premises?
• Data integration patterns such as ETL, replication, messaging, etc., are needed.

This analysis helps shape integration architecture and DevOps pipelines for the cloud.

Identity and access integration

Integrating identity and access management systems allows single sign-on across cloud and on-prem. Map out current IAM solutions, protocols (SAML, OAuth, OIDC), and integration capabilities with target cloud IAM. This enables seamless user experiences while ensuring appropriate access controls apply regardless of where apps or data reside.

Network integration

Examine network connectivity between the current environment and the cloud, including VPNs, direct connects and backbone providers. Assess network capacity and latency for any hybrid or multi-cloud needs. This ensures you can securely access cloud resources without creating performance bottlenecks.

Cost Assessment And Optimization

The cloud’s pay-as-you-go model shifts spending from capital expenses to operating expenses. However, realizing long-term savings requires continuous cost optimization.

Mapping total cost of ownership

Compare current infrastructure, ops, and licensing costs to the costs of equivalent cloud offerings. Estimate a 3-5 year total cost of ownership model accounting for:

• Compute, storage, and networking provisioned
• Managed services purchased – databases, analytics, etc
• Licensing – bring your own or pay for cloud-native options
• Ingress/egress traffic costs
• Operations and labor savings
• Professional services needed

This model includes the total ROI and payback period for moving to the cloud.

Optimizing spend

Cloud waste is rampant without proper governance. Set policies and quotas for:

• Resource allocation limits
• Auto-scaling criteria
• Reserved capacity purchases
• Underutilized instance identification
• Tagging standards for visibility into ownership and purpose

Add cloud financial management tools to monitor spend and optimize it in real time.

Cloud-native services

Assess where shifting to cloud-native PaaS and SaaS offerings reduces complexity and TCO vs staying with familiar IaaS options. Prioritize high-value cloud services with the best ROI.

Skills Assessment And Training

Technology changes require personnel changes, too. Honestly assess cloud readiness gaps among your staff and invest in training to set them up for success.

Cloud skills assessment

Catalog current staff skills across areas like:

• Cloud architectures – IaaS/PaaS/SaaS models
• Administration – accounts, access controls, management
• Provisioning & orchestration – Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes
• Monitoring, logging, and optimization
• Cloud-native development – APIs, microservices, serverless
• Data analytics & BI – cloud data warehouses, big data
• ML ops – model building, deployment, and monitoring

Identify the largest skill gaps to prioritize training.

Training and certification

Create training plans that align with new cloud responsibilities:

• Cloud basics – fundamentals, security, architecture overviews
• Role-specific training – admin, DevOps, engineering, data analytics
• Certifications – AWS, Azure, GCP credentials to validate skills
• Hands-on training – cloud sandbox and labs for practical experience

Retraining helps staffers apply existing skills to new cloud environments.

New cloud roles

Consider recruiting or contracting specialized cloud roles like:

• Cloud architects
• DevOps engineers
• Cloud data engineers
• Cloud security analysts
• Cloud financial analysts
• Cloud service managers

These skills are often scarce or lacking internally when getting started in the cloud.

Cloud Governance

Governing usage is key to managing risk, cost, and consistency in the cloud.

Cloud governance framework

Define policies, procedures, roles, and tools to align cloud usage with business priorities. Elements can include:

• Hierarchical account structures, billing controls, and quotas
• Identity and access governance
• Configuration standards for security, compliance
• Resource tagging conventions
• Automated policy enforcement
• Change control processes
• Cloud service brokerage and catalogs

Right-size governance to balance agility and guardrails as usage matures.

Cloud Center Of Excellence

A cloud center of excellence (CCoE) provides centralized oversight for cross-functional coordination on cloud strategy, migrations, development, and operations. Typical focus areas:

• Cloud adoption roadmaps
• Migration waves planning
• Standards for architectures, security, DevOps
• Financial management
• Education and training
• IT relationship management

CCoEs drive consistency but avoid dictating prescriptive technical choices.

Organizational Culture And Processes

Technology changes faster than people. Making cultural and process shifts is essential for cloud success.

Cultural readiness

Assess cultural orientation around elements like:

• Comfort with the cloud’s pace of change
• Appetite for experimentation and risk
• Collaboration across silos
• Focus on automation over manual control
• Prioritization of innovation and capabilities over infrastructure

Identify culture gaps to address through leadership messaging and training.

Process changes

Optimize processes to enable cloud agility:

• Shift project mindsets to product mentalities
• Adopt agile and DevOps processes
• Streamline release processes with continuous integration/deployment
• Leverage infrastructure as code for cloud provisioning
• Implement site reliability engineering practices
• Drive platform teams over project teams

Updating processes, tooling, and metrics prevents legacy models from hampering cloud outcomes.

The Cloud Readiness Checklist

Transitioning to the cloud requires evaluating people, processes, and technology. Use this comprehensive checklist to assess cloud readiness across all dimensions:

Security and compliance

•  Identify security and compliance requirements
•  Map shared responsibility with cloud providers
•  Assess gaps between needs and cloud capabilities
•  Evaluate compliance needs and cloud provider offerings

Integration with the existing landscape

•  Catalog applications and data stores needing integration
•  Review identity and access management integration needs
•  Analyze network connectivity and capacity requirements

Cost assessment and optimization

•  Create a total cost of ownership model for the cloud
•  Define policies and quotas to govern cloud spend
•  Implement cloud financial management discipline
•  Identify top services for cloud migration prioritization

Skills assessment and training

•  Catalog current staff skills and gaps
•  Develop training plans aligned with new responsibilities
•  Evaluate adding specialized cloud roles and talent