Cloud Strategy: What to Expect When You Work With CDW

Every organization’s cloud journey is different, and the path a business follows depends on its size, industry, specific business requirements and budget.

Some companies are just starting their cloud transformation and don’t know where to begin. Others are further along and want to optimize their cloud operations by automating DevOps practices or integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning, but they don’t know how to go about it.

Navigating the cloud is complex and can be daunting. Fortunately, you can turn to a partner like CDW to architect a comprehensive cloud adoption strategy. And if you need help implementing and managing the cloud environment, CDW provides those services too.

We have leveraged experience, process optimization and cloud partnerships to develop our own custom Cloud Adoption Framework, a blueprint for successfully migrating to the cloud. With the framework, we focus on four key areas to ensure you meet your cloud goals with strong security, governance and cost control measures in place.

1. Strategy and design: We start with a conversation to learn where you are in your cloud journey and what your business drivers are. We calculate the total cost of ownership if you stay on-premises for the next five years, if you deploy a hybrid cloud or if you fully migrate to the cloud. We run the model for a full cloud migration across three, five and seven years to find the break-even point where your organization will begin to see savings.
   
   The plan we develop ensures you adopt cloud in the most effective and cost-efficient way, enabling you to reduce costs, gain operational efficiencies, increase innovation and streamline revenue generation.
   
   
2. Security and governance: We design a fully secure cloud environment that protects applications and data and ensures secure cloud access. This includes securing the edge, implementing policy controls, adhering to compliance frameworks and integrating with existing security standards.
   
   You can implement the strategy we develop on your own or engage our professional services team to collaborate with you to implement it.
   
   
3. Migration and modernization: We develop a migration strategy based on your business needs. For example, applications and data that have interdependencies should be moved together in the same wave. We also design and build a landing zone: a cloud environment that’s fully provisioned, secure and ready to host workloads, and connected to your on-premises data center.
   
   We guide you through the tedious discovery of application rationalization, identifying the least complex workloads for rehosting, which workloads can be refactored with minimal code change, and which need to be rearchitected to optimize cloud-native benefits.
   
   
4. FinOps and operations: We encourage and assist organizations with establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence, where a team of IT and business leaders drive the cloud initiative through centralized oversight. The CCOE sets standards and guidelines, and enforces the multiyear cloud roadmap.
   
   CDW also helps businesses develop a framework for FinOps, which is the financial management of your cloud-aligned costs. The goal is to optimize cost savings and cost avoidance from discovery through operations. CDW offers the Inscape by CDW tool, which provides real-time spending data, forecasts spending and provides recommendations on reducing costs. 

If your organization wants to migrate to cloud, a trusted partner like CDW can help you develop and deploy a comprehensive cloud strategy that meets your business needs and budget. Learn more about CDW’s cloud services.