Measuring the success of a cloud migration project is a tricky task. At the start, it’s likely to be costly, and immediate ROI may not be visible due to architecture costs. Therefore, depending on what you want to achieve with your project, typical success indicators, such as decrease in IT expenditure, may not be immediately quantifiable.
Although you can set cloud migration goals, to truly measure this success of your cloud migration project you need to understand:
- Why are you looking to migrate to the cloud?
Some reasons could be to streamline business practices, minimise overhead IT expenditure, or to give your team the flexibility to safely work remotely.
- What are you hoping to get out of the project?
Depending on your business needs, you may want a more efficient user journey, to minimise team admin and maximise time spent with the customer.
- Who are your key stakeholders, and what are their goals?
Every stakeholder will have different areas of interest. How do they align with your project? How can you show business growth?
By asking these questions to your team at the beginning of your cloud migration project, you will understand everyone’s motivation to change, and potential barriers for entry, such as user adoption. Then, at each stage of your project, you can align it to a specific business driver, helping you and your team measure the success of your project.
While cloud migration success may not be immediately visible, there are four ways you and your team can use to begin measuring how well your project is working:
- How productive are your team in using the new cloud platform
- The cost of your cloud migration, potential ROI and predicted increased revenue
- How future-proof your solution is
- The reduced cost and burden of managing your infrastructure
Boosted productivity for your workers
One of the biggest challenges businesses face when migrating to the Cloud is team productivity. Although your employees are used to their current data management systems and processes, it doesn’t mean they’re efficient.
A good goal measure for cloud migration success is how productive your team is in the new system.
Your new solution should be making your processes easier, not more complex. Although there may be some teething problems, ultimately it should rely on automation to minimise administration. Increased user productivity can be achieved through:
- Enhanced automation functions, making it easier to retrieve basic information, minimising unnecessary administrative time.
- Easy access to business data and applications, enabling them to do their jobs more effectively, wherever they’re calling ‘the office’ that day.
- Improved team collaboration, making it easier to connect with colleagues, share information, and seamlessly work on projects together.
Long-term increase in revenue margin
No business wants to channel money into a project, only for it to not demonstrate a long-term ROI.
Although there are significant costs associated with cloud migration, ROI may be hidden initially and instant success is clouded by upfront costs, upskilling staff, or increased administration time building your new infrastructure. Achieving a return on your investment, however, will become clear within the first three years, with savings becoming apparent as processes become more efficient and overhead maintenance costs reduced.
Therefore, in order to see your return on investment throughout the cloud migration process, it’s important to measure revenue margin. While upfront costs may encompass the project, focus on money saving efficiencies, such as:
- The lifespan of infrastructure and hardware. Although replacing devices and servers may come at a significant initial cost, the longer the hardware is used and well maintained, the more ROI you will achieve.
- Internal team efficiency. Streamlined processes and productivity means less time waiting for systems to load and more time actually helping your customers. When migrating to the cloud, a trusted partner should give you an unbiased view of a user’s current journey and how internal processes can be streamlined.
- Heightened end-customer experience. Ultimately, streamlined processes and increased productivity means more hands-on time spent with your customers. With core customer data stored in the cloud, customers will have the same experience no matter whether your teams are working from the office or remotely.
Top tip
Money saving efficiencies, such as lifespan of hardware, streamlining team processes, and heightened customer experience will increase your long-term margin.
Discover what M247 can achieve for your business through our no-obligation cloud migration assessment.
Future proof data storage and processing capacity
When measuring a public cloud migration’s success, it’s crucial to not only think about today and tomorrow, but years down the line.
Ultimately, to maximise the ROI of your investment, you need to future-proof your data storage and processing capacity in order to successfully scale. To do this, you will need to question two areas of business growth:
- Long term – traditional, incremental scaling.
What is your predicted company growth in the next five years, and how does your business model cover for that change?
How adaptable is your cloud and hardware? Or will any changes need to be made in order to deal with a scaling team?
How will your business handle a growth in customer base? - Short term – day, week, or month increases in customer demand.
Is your new public cloud infrastructure able to cope with short-term spikes of demand?
How will your servers manage with peak seasonal business, such as Black Friday sales for retail?
Once the peak period is over, how quickly will they reduce back to day-to-day running?
Regardless of the size of your business, a successful public cloud system would be able to easily adapt to these core changes in user and customer base as your business scales.
Reduced cost and burden of managing infrastructure
Whether its on-site servers, maintaining legacy hardware, or auto-renewing licence fees, your business will have significant IT expenditures.
Although there are upfront costs associated with cloud migration, ROI can be achieved over time by reducing these legacy costs.
Working with a good cloud migration provider allows you to demonstrate cloud migration success by saving or generating money through:
- Reducing the reliance on long-term hardware that will not need to be upgraded in the upcoming months.
- Server maintenance and management fees as standard in your partner’s pricing and fees.
- Streamlined elasticity and scalability, allowing you to access more or less data as and when needed, easily dealing with seasonal traffic without wasting vital server space.
- Agile deployment. Once your public cloud platform has been implemented, it’s easy to amend infrastructure by creating new proof of concept staging areas, testing them internally, and, once approved, upload them. This fast deployment will save you significant resources and administrative time going forward.
At M247, we can help your business to reduce overhead costs and maximise your cloud transition. Start step one of the migration process today by booking your free cloud migration assessment today.
Key takeaways
The value of your cloud migration success can be found by measuring the agility, productivity, and quality of your system, as well as ROI and employee satisfaction. These KPIs must be driven by your business goals and deliverables.
Therefore, before you start your cloud migration project, sit down with key stakeholders and influencers to define:
- What you want to achieve with your cloud migration project.
- The expected ROI.
- The timescale for this project.
- Any potential barriers to entry that you need to overcome.
Once these have been determined, your business will be able to set clear, achievable goals in line with your cloud migration strategy.
Book your cloud migration assessment
In order to understand what you need to migrate and when, you need to know how your current infrastructure is operating.
Book your free cloud migration assessment with M247, and begin your migration journey today.
