Is Your Organization Ready for Cloud? This Tool Can Tell You

The Big Idea 

The cloud computing market is expected to reach $623 billion by next year. This article will help you discover how to check your cloud readiness using Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) Cloud Readiness Assessment Tool (CART) tool to support a seamless migration.  

Why is it important 

If not properly prepared, cloud migration can be costly, complicated, and slow for organizations. AWS CART is designed to help you discover possibilities, identify gaps, build a plan for seamless migration of your on-prem infrastructure to cloud. 

What’s ahead:   

This article will cover:  

• Cloud Adoption 
• Benefits of Cloud  
• Cloud Adoption Readiness 
• AWS CART 
• AWS CART success stories 

Cloud Adoption 

Cloud adoption is a business strategy for improving the scalability of internet-based database capabilities while reducing costs and risks. To achieve this, enterprises must pursue cloud transformation: 

Cloud transformation: the process of migrating electronic assets from local servers to the cloud. Cloud transformation allows you to save data to an off-site location accessible via public internet or a dedicated private network connection.  

Benefits of Cloud Adoption 

Cloud storage is rapidly overrunning on-prem data warehouses because of its many positive business impacts including scalability, speed, collaboration, continuity, and rapid ROI. 

• Scalable: Unlike on-premises storage, cloud capacity is virtually unlimited so you can scale up as much as you need. 
• Increased time to market: Implementing a cloud server takes mere minutes compared to a physical server that requires days or weeks to execute. 
• Better collaboration: Cloud transformation allows even the most diverse teams to access, retrieve, and process information anytime, anywhere. 
• Business continuity: Cloud transformation provides protection from natural disaster losses or system failures that local servers cannot. The cloud even includes a built-in data backup as an added insurance policy for business continuity. 
• Centralized network management: Your cloud provider is responsible for maintaining your data, and freeing up your staff from network management tasks. 
• Improved security and compliance: RapidScale found that 94% of businesses saw an improvement in security after switching to the cloud, and 91% said the cloud makes it easier to meet government compliance requirements. 
• Cost-effectiveness: Cloud environments utilize a subscription approach, so you only pay for the storage you need. Pair this with the cost and time savings realized after migrating data to the cloud, and the potential for ROI increases. 

Cloud Adoption Readiness 

The benefits of cloud adoption are excellent indeed. But in order to experience them, organizations must first determine their preparedness to migrate.  

Cloud adoption readiness is the process of examining your applications and data to determine if they can be moved to the cloud with minimal impact on operational continuity. This process usually includes an itemized checklist that guides the process and alerts enterprises of what needs to be done to ensure a smooth migration. 

AWS CART 

AWS designed its own program to help organizations assess their progress with cloud adoption and identify gaps in organizational skills and processes called the Cloud Readiness Assessment Tool (CART). With the insights from the CART, you can formulate an effective plan that follows AWS best practices for migration. It provides you with a migration checklist and a 16-question online survey that assesses your system and organizational readiness for cloud migration. After taking the survey, an assessment report is prepared for you, which provides insights across six dimensions:  

• Business 
• People 
• Process 
• Platform 
• Operations 
• Security 

The report charts your readiness and helps you find areas for improvement. For those enterprises scoring low on the readiness scale, AWS CART provides resources for improving the score. Your custom report also comes with a heatmap and a radar chart. This comprehensive report will be your key to planning your migration and delivering convincing messages to stakeholders to get their buy-in. 

Here are a few examples of how AWS CART has helped facilitate successful enterprise cloud migration efforts:  

• CART recommended delivering knowledge to people for easy and cooperative adoption. As a result, a university migrated 30 applications to the cloud in 3 months. 
• The assessment revealed the level of maturity and recommended steps for optimization of internal capabilities to a weather service company so the company could reduce the speed of data delivery from minutes to seconds. 
• The insights from the CART report helped a beverage company develop a migration roadmap that organized steps for migration with minimum disruption to the flow of current operations.  

Is your organization ready for Cloud Migration? 

Cloud is casting an overwhelming shadow over traditional on-premises data warehouses. In order to remain competitive, it is imperative that organizations prepare for cloud migration, starting with determining their cloud adoption readiness. The AWS CART tool is incredibly useful for discovering progress and gaps in the cloud process to ensure business continuity during data transfer. Whether you’re ready to move immediately or you have some work to do, taking the first step towards cloud adoption is a move in the right direction. 

To learn more about your organization’s readiness to adopt cloud, check out Apexon’s Cloud Strategy services, Cloud Migration services or get in touch directly using the form below.