Cloud Adoption Plan

Abstract:  gotomyerp Cloud Adoption Plan (gCAP) offers the best practices and simple guidance to move an organization’s cloud computing, simply, safely and easily no matter the size of entity.  From micro, small, mid-sized, large and enterprise.

The gCAP is made easy by areas of focus that are relevant to implementing cloud-based systems.

This whitepaper series covers the Business Reason for aligning IT strategy to business strategy and evaluating, costs, value and benefits gained through gotomyerp’s cloud adoption.

Cloud Adoption Plan

A Business Reason to Go Cloud.

Introduction: Requirements always leads function (or features).

Consider what your business does and how your technology currently supports it.  Please think about which parts of your business are aligned to best enable you to develop your cloud adoption strategy.

This thought exercise should include these fundamental elements:

1. Physical Infrastructure: Buildings, locations, utilities, internet connections.
2. Phone, Email, accounting and enterprise requirements planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), warehouse management (WMS), e-commerce (ECOM), etc.
3. What Business Cycle are you in? Start up, Growth, Established, Expansion, Mature or Exiting.

The Business Cycle may drive your core requirements more than any other need.  You will want to make sure that you have a plan that adequately provides you well managed costs and achieves appropriate expectations with reasonable value.

^{Author’s Comment:}

^{Some of our clients had a perspective that technology based on cloud adoption eliminates or drastically reduces costs all together.  This is not a well-aligned assumption.  Rather, clouding largely shifts costs so that your investment becomes effective and you gain flexibility by leveraging the technology optimally.}

The best news is that cloud adoption strategies can be more easily adjusted as business needs increase or decrease.  A move to cloud gives you the opportunity to gain insights into your business because there can be, if designed well, a focal point of measureable systems in one place.

As you begin to manage your costs and investments, you will be in a better position to predict your next steps. Those next steps may allow you to:

• Allocate funds used to accelerate the process cloud adoption
• Facilitate addition marketing, advertising, sales, production or expansion
• Increase automation
• Invest in your people by modernizing their skills
• May have the potential to increase employee loyalty and satisfaction
• Create a decentralized workforce and leveraging global talent