Your Journey to the Cloud – Part 1: Assessment & Planning

Many of you are already guiding your organisation through its journey to the cloud. Whether you are just starting out or are nearing completion of your transition to a cloud-based business, you will likely see your organisation’s journey as unique—shaped by your history, ways of working, competitive position and specific needs. However, as cloud computing now approaches its third decade, there are valuable lessons to be learnt from those who have already navigated this critical transformation.

The Journey to Cloud in Three Simple Steps

At Searchlight, we have played a leading role in numerous successful cloud journeys, working with a diverse array of organisations ranging from publicly listed companies to private equity-backed multinationals. Drawing on this experience, we have distilled a series of lessons that we would like to share with you over three articles, covering:

• Cloud Assessment & Planning

• Cloud Transformation & Implementation

• Cloud Optimisation & Improvement

Part 1: Cloud Assessment & Planning

As with any major business transformation, you need a clear picture of where you want to be (your Cloud Vision), an actionable roadmap to get there (your Cloud Strategy), and a compelling value proposition that balances benefits, costs, and risks (your Cloud Business Case).

Cloud Vision

Your cloud vision is the foundation for your journey and should:

• Clearly articulate how your organisation will operate and benefit from migrating legacy systems and processes to flexible, on-demand business services that can adapt and scale in line with your corporate objectives.

• Be underpinned by use cases that demonstrate enhanced customer journeys and improvements in both front and back-office efficiency.

• Offer a platform for an agile operating model capable of rapid market entry, swift product and service launches, and accommodating both organic and inorganic growth.

Top Tip: Make it tangible for stakeholders by illustrating a key customer journey enhanced by cloud solutions—demonstrating how the future state will revolutionise customer experience and drive cost efficiencies.

Cloud Strategy

The most effective way to communicate your plans to stakeholders is through a series of visual slides showing:

• Your current “As-Is” state, mapping the complexities of your application landscape and highlighting business bottlenecks, risks, and costs.

• A transitional state, with select services migrated to SaaS/PaaS/IaaS, showcasing early benefits.

• A “To-Be” state, visualising all business and IT services integrated seamlessly in the cloud, delivering streamlined processes and exceptional customer journeys.

Behind these visuals should sit a comprehensive plan detailing tasks, required resources, and a roadmap outlining key milestones for both transformation and the business.

Top Tip: Highlight early business wins within your milestone plan to demonstrate benefit realisation for key sponsors at every stage.

Cloud Business Case

Ultimately, any transformation—such as moving to cloud—must be supported by a robust business case that gives your leadership, particularly your CFO, all necessary information to secure approval at board level. You will, of course, already have engaged key executives by walking them through how the proposed changes support their objectives. It is vital that your plans are fully aligned with wider business goals and targets.

Based on our experience, there are several key characteristics your cloud transformation business case should address:

• Commercial Model: Large system changes are typically funded as CapEx, amortised across a system’s lifespan. With SaaS, up-front costs decrease, replaced by ongoing OpEx for subscriptions. This impacts the P&L, so finance must be involved throughout.

• Cyber Security: With the increasing prevalence of cyber incidents, executives require strong reassurance regarding data protection and operational resilience. Security considerations need to be front and centre, as they are a legal responsibility.

• Network Dependency: Shifting everything to the cloud makes your business highly reliant on network connectivity. Bandwidth and resilience must be planned and invested in, to support the required SLAs—this must be anticipated in the business case, not left as a problem for later.

Top Tip: Provide options and phased approaches in your business plan, giving room for the organisation to shape the journey towards their preferred outcomes, rather than presenting an all-or-nothing scenario.

In summary, the journey to cloud begins with a well-crafted Vision, Strategy, and Business Case. Searchlight has supported many organisations by ensuring these critical foundations are strong from the outset.

Contact Searchlight Consulting to learn more about how we can support your organisation’s cloud journey.

In the next article, we will explore the Transformation and Implementation phase of the journey to the cloud.

Looking forward to staying in touch. Follow us on LinkedIn for further insights.