How can the cloud-first approach define a strategic path to innovation

Cloud migration strategy for innovation and agility

In recent years, business leaders have increasingly pivoted their strategies to embrace continuous transformation and modernisation, placing cloud at the centre of this shift.

Cloud platforms have proven instrumental in helping organisations respond swiftly to evolving customer preferences, accelerate product development cycles and improve speed to market. Moreover, the cloud’s pay-as-you-go model offers significant cost efficiency by enabling real-time scalability and reducing the need for large upfront infrastructure investments. This shift from capital to operational expenditure allows organisations to redirect resources towards high-impact areas, such as research and development, directly fuelling innovation and long-term growth.

For instance, adopting a cloud-based solution for real-time collaboration and data processing can significantly reduce development time, enhance cross-functional collaboration and foster a dynamic environment that drives innovation.

An FMCG client modernised their current legacy reporting platform to an end-to-end cloud-based solution, which not only brought close to 7,000 cross-functional users on a single platform, ensuring 99.97 percent data and functional accuracy but also helped in rapid product developments, bringing down the production release for apps to less than two weeks.

Enabling cloud-first legacy transformation

The journey to cloud migration usually begins with a detailed assessment of existing legacy systems by understanding the current architecture, dependencies and performance metrics. Once the underlying stack is mapped, one of the vital steps in this entire endeavour is to clearly define a comprehensive modernisation strategy (6R/7R) using industry-defined tools, frameworks and methodologies to arrive at the decision of choosing the right cloud OEM and deployment framework for your needs.

While a “lift-and-shift” approach may seem like the quickest path to the cloud, it often falls short of unlocking true value. Organisations should instead re-evaluate their architecture, prioritise domain-driven use cases and embrace microservices to enhance agility and scalability. This requires a balanced understanding of both technology and industry context.

Embracing a mindset of continuous improvement is crucial for success. Staying aligned with evolving industry trends and emerging technologies ensures that modernisation efforts remain relevant and deliver meaningful impact.

Furthermore, integrating DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines accelerates the innovation cycle, enabling rapid iteration and faster time-to-market. By optimising cloud infrastructure with a focus on cloud-native architecture, microservices, security and compliance, organisations can better manage costs while channelling more resources into innovation-driven initiatives.

A phased approach to cloud-first transformation

Below are the three key steps organisations must follow:

1. Start with clear objectives

Before initiating any migration effort, it's crucial to clearly define the reasons for moving to the cloud. This includes:

Aligning with business goals: Whether accelerating time-to-market, improving customer experience or enabling data-driven decision-making, your cloud strategy should directly support your broader business objectives.

• Identifying key success metrics: Establish measurable KPIs, such as cost savings, performance improvements or innovation velocity, to track progress and demonstrate value.
• Engaging stakeholders early: Involving business and IT leaders from the outset ensures alignment, secures buy-in and helps avoid roadblocks later in the journey.

2. Create a robust modernisation plan

A successful migration goes beyond merely moving workloads; it's about modernising them to take full advantage of cloud-native capabilities. This includes:

• Evaluating domain-driven use cases: Prioritise workloads based on business impact, complexities and readiness. Focus on areas where cloud can deliver the most value.
• Adopting microservices architecture: Break down monolithic applications into modular and independently deployable services to improve agility, scalability and fault tolerance.
• Using modern technologies: Integrate AI/ML, serverless computing and real-time analytics to unlock new capabilities and drive continuous innovation.

3. Embark on an incremental journey

Instead of pursuing a massive and one-time migration, organisations should embrace a phased and iterative approach that fosters continuous learning and adaptation:

• Start small, scale fast: Begin with pilot projects or less critical workloads to build confidence and refine your approach.
• Iterate and optimise: Use feedback loops to continuously improve processes, architecture and governance as you scale.
• Ensure business continuity: A phased approach minimises disruption, reduces risk and allows teams to adapt to new tools and practices gradually.

Enterprises should use cloud not just as an infrastructure OEM but as a critical enabler for growth, unlocking new possibilities and driving sustainable growth. The journey to cloud is not just about technology; it's about transforming mindsets to enable business operations to evolve continuously through innovation and adaptation.

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