Cloud Transformation Roadmap Planning

The tasks and challenges of the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), also known as the Cloud Competence Center, are manifold. The CCoE acts as a centralized institution that is commissioned to lead the organization as a whole through the process of Cloud Transformation. According to Gartner (2019), the CCoE holds the cloud computing governance function and serves as an internal cloud service broker. It also acts as a point of contact for advising stakeholders such as IT departments or cloud service consumers and is tasked with driving cloud transformation in a structured but swift manner.

In a preceding post, we have already presented the core tasks of the CCoE and why an organization should establish a dedicated cloud team. If you are unfamiliar with the core tasks of the Cloud Center of Excellence I encourage you to read our article on "The 7 Core Tasks of the Cloud Center of Excellence" first!

In this CCoE Feature blog post series, we will have a closer look at these seven core tasks and show you how our Cloud Transformation Platform Txture forms the basis to accomplish them.

Let’s start our series with Cloud Transformation Roadmap Planning, the first of seven core tasks of the Cloud Center of Excellence.

Cloud Transformation Roadmaps

Creating the transformation roadmap is a key activity to align the cloud strategy and investments, maximize cloud benefits, enhance customer experience and minimize business disruption during the cloud transformation. Furthermore, the CCoE needs to outline the scope of the transformation and identify low-hanging-fruits, such as applications that are easy to transform and guarantee a quick return on investment.

How to create a cloud transformation roadmap? Often this is done with Excel or common project management tools, but Txture can calculate the transformation sequence much more detailed and share it with all stakeholders. Txture supports Transformation Planning with a central cloud transformation management console, the Transformation Cockpit. This intuitive management console has been built on a standardized transformation planning and application assessment process and integrates features for all transformation phases. Besides the application data discovery and Cloud Readiness Assessment features, generating a migration roadmap is supported. It also generates Migration Timing Recommendations based on the technical, security, compliance and business aspects of each application.

Transformation Cockpit

The screenshots below show some central components of the Transformation Cockpit, Txture’s central transformation management console.

Process shown in the Transformation Cockpit
Five tabs on the top of the Transformation Cockpit show Txture’s standardized transformation management process from discovery to deciding the migration strategy. The predefined process structures your transformation project at a glance and shows at what stage your applications currently are.

Process shown in the Transformation Cockpit

Cloud Readiness Scores
The overall cloud readiness score that is shown for the selected application, includes a proposed migration strategy and migration timing. You can quickly check whether enough information has been gathered for the selected application to make sound assumptions about the application’s cloud readiness and migration strategy. The overall score of each application is composed of four subscores: Txture takes into account technical, security, compliance and business aspects and allows you to get detailed information from different viewpoints. The cloud readiness score is important to make better transformation decisions and represent the central key figure for identifying applications that are easy to migrate and promise quick return on investment.

Cloud Readiness Scores

Transformation Management Dashboard

In addition to the Transformation Cockpit, Txture provides preconfigured cloud migration roadmap dashboards:

1. This example of a dashboard shows the next applications on the transformation roadmap ranked by their cloud readiness and expected cloud migration benefit. This way, you always have an eye on which applications will go through the cloud transformation next.
2. Applications are shown in a scatter plot with the cloud strategy fit on the y-axis and the cloud readiness on the x-axis. It allows to quickly identify “low-hanging fruits” such as applications that are easy to transform and guarantee a quick return on investment.
3. Cloud Migration waves are represented in a Gantt chart. Each migration wave summarizes a set of applications that are migrated during the same time range. The tool helps you to decide which applications should be migrated together, in which order and at what time. Doing the migration in various waves improves the transformation quality and reduces risk.
4. Finally, an overview of how many applications will be migrated in the short, medium, or long-term is shown. The platform helps to be on time and on budget. Using Txture’s dashboards, you always get the information you need to react to incidents rapidly. Additional visualization can easily be added since dashboards in Txture are flexibly extendable.

Exemplary Transformation Roadmapping Dashboard

Our series on the Cloud Center of Excellence has just started. Come back to read our second installment of this series. The next post about Governing Costs and Optimizing Cloud Portfolio will come soon!

Do you already want to know more about Txture's Cloud Transformation Platform and want to discuss how Txture can facilitate the cloud journey of your organization? Feel free to get in touch and book your own demo session!