A cloud strategy serves as a roadmap for cloud adoption, ensuring alignment with business objectives, optimising resource use, and maintaining efficiency. It helps organisations understand the purpose and benefits of cloud investments while preventing fragmented usage. Additionally, a cloud strategy sets expectations for performance, scalability, and reliability, ensuring the infrastructure supports business needs and minimises disruptions.
The Evaluation Phase is crucial in developing a cloud adoption plan because it ensures that cloud adoption is consistent with an organisation’s specific business objectives, technical requirements, and regulatory limitations. Companies can prioritise their cloud requirements by examining important business factors such as cost effectiveness, agility, security, and innovation. Furthermore, analysing the current application portfolio aids in determining which workloads should be transferred, preserved, optimised, or replaced. Without this methodical review, firms risk coming up an inadequate project plan with wrong processes, resulting in higher expenses, operational disruptions, or compliance issues. A properly completed Evaluation Phase lays the groundwork for a successful, scalable, and cost-effective cloud transformation.
Phases of Cloud Adoption
The cloud adoption journey consists of five key phases:
| Phase | Objective |
|---|---|
| Evaluation | Develop a plan based on business drivers |
| Planning & Assessment | Discover and assess application portfolio for migration |
| Implementation | Migrate applications and validate performance |
| Operations | Run applications in the cloud |
| Optimisation & Evolution | Continuously improve cloud performance and cost-efficiency |
This article focusses on the Evaluation phase, in which businesses determine their business objectives and develop an appropriate cloud adoption plan.
Understanding Your Cloud Priorities
Every enterprise has unique business drivers, timelines, skills, and cloud experience. Here are some of the key factors driving cloud adoption today:
| Business Driver | Why It Matters |
|---|---|
| Digital Transformation | Enable innovation with modern cloud technologies |
| Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) | Enhance automation and decision-making |
| Internet of Things (IoT) & Mobility | Improve connectivity and real-time analytics |
| DevOps & Agility | Accelerate software development and deployment cycles |
| Operational Efficiency | Reduce IT workload and focus on business growth |
| Cost Optimisation | Move from fixed costs to pay-as-you-go pricing |
| Modernising Legacy Systems | Upgrade outdated applications for better performance |
Once you define your priorities, you need to assess your application portfolio by considering:
- Business Criticality: Which applications are essential to your operations?
- Security & Compliance: Are there industry regulations restricting cloud migration?
- Integration & Dependencies: Do applications depend on legacy systems?
- Performance & Scalability: Can cloud infrastructure support your workloads?
Based on this evaluation, you can select the best cloud adoption process.
Choosing the Right Cloud Adoption Process
There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to cloud adoption. Most enterprises use a mix of different processes. Below are six common cloud migration approaches:
1. Retire / Revisit / Reoptimise
Not all applications need to move to the cloud. Some can be retired, postponed, or optimised before migration.
| Process | Action |
|---|---|
| Retire | Decommission unused legacy applications |
| Revisit | Postpone cloud migration and assess at a later stage |
| Reoptimise | Update and refresh applications on-premises before migrating |
2. Retain (Stay On-Premises, but Use Cloud Tech)
Some applications must remain on-premises due to data privacy, compliance, or security reasons. However, businesses can still leverage Oracle Cloud at Customer, which brings Oracle Cloud capabilities to their own data centers.
📌 Example: AT&T migrated Oracle Database workloads to Oracle Cloud at Customer for security and performance benefits while maintaining full control.
3. Rehost (Lift-and-Shift)
This involves moving applications to the cloud with minimal changes, allowing businesses to quickly gain cloud benefits.
📌 Example: Alliance Data Systems rehosted six environments (PeopleSoft, Hyperion, OBIEE) to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), saving approximately $1M in the first year.
4. Replatform (Move & Optimise)
This process involves making moderate changes to applications to leverage cloud-native services like Oracle Autonomous Database or Oracle Management Cloud for automation and monitoring.
📌 Example: Beeline moved disaster recovery and ancillary services to OCI, reducing costs and closing two data centers, saving $1M annually.
5. Replace (Move to SaaS)
Instead of migrating applications, companies can replace legacy systems with cloud-based SaaS solutions.
📌 Example: Western Digital replaced multiple legacy systems with Oracle ERP Cloud, streamlining approvals by 70% and reducing suppliers by 50%.
6. Rebuild (Cloud-Native Development)
Organisations can build new applications from scratch using modern cloud-native architectures such as microservices, Kubernetes, and serverless computing.
📌 Example: Sauce Video adopted Oracle Kubernetes Engine, allowing faster and more scalable cloud deployments.
Mapping Strategies to Use Cases
| Use Case | Best Cloud Strategies |
|---|---|
| Migrating enterprise applications | Rehost, Replatform, Replace |
| Hybrid or on-premises requirements | Retain, Rehost |
| Development & testing environments | Rehost, Retain |
| Big Data, AI, or HPC workloads | Replatform, Rebuild |
| Cloud-native application development | Rebuild |
Final Thoughts: The Journey to Oracle Cloud
A successful Oracle Cloud adoption follows a phased approach, allowing businesses to test, validate, and optimise their cloud adoption plan before full-scale deployment.
Typical Cloud Adoption Phases
1️⃣ Develop & Test in the Cloud
2️⃣ Disaster Recovery & Backup in Cloud
3️⃣ Hybrid Cloud Deployment (Extend Data Center to Cloud)
4️⃣ Full Cloud Migration for Production Workloads
Successful cloud adoption necessitates a robust plan that outlines the intended cloud infrastructure, development roadmap, business objectives, and cloud governance. An effective cloud plan outlines the functionality, service levels, and costs involved with cloud computing.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a suite of complimentary cloud services that allows you to construct and execute a variety of applications and services in a highly available hosted environment. It helps enterprises implement a bespoke cloud adoption plan by providing flexible deployment options, high-performance computing, and cost-effective solutions. OCI allows for seamless interaction with current IT infrastructure, whether in public, hybrid, or multicloud environments. Businesses can move and manage workloads with confidence thanks to industry-specific solutions, strong security, and compliance frameworks. OCI’s AI-powered automation, scalable compute and storage solutions, and enhanced networking improve performance while lowering operational overhead.
OCI also offers cost-effective pricing structures, AI/ML-driven analytics, and seamless workload migration to help enterprises modernise efficiently. Its compatibility with Oracle and third-party apps, Kubernetes, and serverless technologies makes it suitable for both traditional companies and cloud-native organisations. By integrating security, automation, and scalability, OCI enables businesses to design and implement a cloud adoption plan that is tailored to their specific needs.
