The first step toward gaining new benefits from your cloud operations is to devise a strategy built on your current business goals and long-term plans. It will be crucial to make sure your cloud strategy not only enables new tech efficiencies for your teams, but also contributes to your company being a more competitive player in your market.

Keep in mind that the work you do at this stage is vital to the rest of your cloud efforts. Without creating a thorough strategy at the outset of the process, your organization’s ability to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer will be limited. 

Since the cloud is a central part of your infrastructure, planning a new strategy should involve all the key stakeholders. Being inclusive is vital, and you should gather the viewpoints of people throughout your organization to ensure your efforts will benefit everyone, whether you’re planning an extension of current cloud strategy or a brand-new implementation.

The essential IT decision makers should be at the table, such as the IT operations and support managers, the IT security manager, the chief information security officer, and solution architects. You’ll also need to enlist the help of business and finance managers, HR managers, and governance team managers, including the chief information officer. With this group on board, you’ll have the full range of perspectives needed for a well-rounded strategy.

Once you’ve assembled your strategy team together, asking the right questions will help you devise a comprehensive strategy, and these essential ones can get your started:

• What’s your vision for the cloud? You and the team of stakeholders should define what you want to achieve and what your success metrics will be. Do you have plans to involve the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) or AI in your infrastructure? What are your short- and long-term goals? Now’s the time to make those decisions.
• What are the tech gaps you’re facing? Analyzing your infrastructure will be important to understanding where improvements can be made to ensure you’ll get the most out of the cloud today and in the future. You can pinpoint where any data silos exist that hinder collaboration or a single source of truth for your organization. 
• Is your culture ready for change? When making any kind of change in tech tools and operations, you have to think about how willing people will be to accept new cloud-based procedures. Communicating why a change is needed and the benefits it will bring should be a fundamental part of your strategy. You’ll also need to consider how different teams will use new cloud-based tools and help each of them transition to new processes.
• How will you execute your cloud strategy? Here you’ll plan the rollout tactics you’ll take, along with the cloud platform you’ll select, your security plans, and how you’ll train users on the new system. You’ll also need to discuss finding a cloud service provider, what you’ll look for when choosing one, and what your cloud migration plan will consist of (more on that below).
• Will you have feedback channels available? Once your new infrastructure is in action, you’ll need to be open to feedback from all the different teams on what works and what doesn’t. You may need to make some adjustments once your new system is in place and your IT support team will also need to be ready to handle any questions or issues that come up.

When you’ve been able to answer each of these questions, you’ll have a solid foundation for creating an effective cloud strategy that will put new efficiencies in reach, and you can then start thinking about how to be execute that strategy. 

Each manufacturer will develop different cloud strategies and, additionally, have different plans for how they’ll migrate their infrastructure. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Your company’s infrastructure, applications, and operations will be deciding factors in the best migration choice.

You’ll be able to choose the best path forward for your business by partnering with a cloud service provider, who can assess your operations and create a customized solution based on the best cloud service model for your business, whether that’s IaaS, PaaS, Saas, or a combination of all three.

To learn more about choosing a cloud migration path and developing a cloud strategy, download our ebook, To the Cloud & Beyond. It offers an in-depth look at how the cloud is transforming manufacturing operations, providing new ways of managing and analyzing data while enabling greater resiliency when challenges arrive. With our insights, you can expand your cloud infrastructure and be better equipped to meet future demands.