Power Platform | The new Cloud Transformation

I´ve been recently sharing with you the articles about the Cloud Adoption Framework comparisons. Today, I´d like to drill deeper while thinking out of the lens of a customer starting or just being in their Cloud Transformation journey. Before anyone get started with a journey, let´s expect them setting up some targets & goals to achieve within this transformation project.

Above visual shows an example of a customer running through their apps & processes portfolio to run a first inventory and classification process, before by enriching data with a Cloud Assessment process mapping those to their targets. In this example case: an aspiration to move 60% of their apps and processes into the Cloud and eliminate 20% of them.

Taking a look into Microsoft´s Cloud Adoption Framework or professional services offered via their partner ecosystem, you do find three typical options you could take into account.

• A: „lift & shift“ to a modern platform
• B: Refactor, Rearchitect or Rebuild
• C: Build New or Extend

Those Options assume, you´ve build yourself an inventory, performed an assessment and considered best working and fitting options to go with. In many situations, there´s a mix of all three of them ongoing during a Cloud Transformation journey. This is due to the apps & processes growing over the last couple of decades, but also to maximize business value and -outcomes.

Let´s take a look at another visual that presents the options on the left side, the Microsoft Cloud solutions you could take into account for achieving your company´s goals in the center and on the right hand side, you do find the most common targets followed by customers. This conclude using both low-code and code-first options in terms of a modernization of the current app & processes portfolio.

You do find software or services, that remain untouched (Retain), due to time, cost and effort, but also business- or IT view perspective – such as existing Excel spreadsheets with Macros included, Microsoft Teams (SharePoint) content too complex to touch or even legacy applications such as SAP. Though last one may become part of a „lift & shift“ option to run this service via Cloud in future (SAP on Azure), instead of on-premises. You would therefore fulfill on the goal of Rehost.

You will also find software or services you´re classifying as „end of lifecycle“ and you would follow the strategy of Retire, such as Dynamics CRM (3.0, 4.0, 2011) on-premises or (Lotus) IBM Notes and more.

For the remaining 30% (again, just an example of your target) which are inside the Modernize bucket, you could either Refactor, Rearchitect or Rebuild or them being Replaced. Whatever your target percentages might be, this bucket needs your attention today and should be rethought. Why?

One aspect of your Cloud Transformation strategy is to move between control and productivity. While previously you would have just taken into account maybe Azure IaaS Services to lift & shift your application and processes portfolio, you now have the options to either follow PaaS for a refactor or rearchitect or you could even go and follow the SaaS and Low-code track for lowering your IT maintenance effort and costs while increasing security or governance and staying flexible in terms of adjustments/changes to your business.

Cloud Transformation journeys therefore are no longer Azure-services only driven projects. Furthermore, you need to take into account the business side of your application and processes portfolio and consider your Cloud Transformation to be influenced by low-code – such as Power Platform.

In a recent conversation during a project, I saw this paradigm-shift already ongoing, when we discussed what´s ongoing during the decision making process. Above visual outlines best practices steps in building the business case. What starts by identifying risks by building an inventory, setup threats on business-, technical- and security risks and finally end up in a cloud assessment process, will be re-used to build or revise your strategy in stage two. What used to be IT-only driven decisions in the past, transformed today into Business + IT-driven decision making with low-code influence.

You may heard the terminology of #FusionTeams inside software development. I see those teams acting 2.5x more agile in their Cloud Transformation projects, just due to the fact of data-enriched decision making and sharing tasks between teams to follow the company´s targets and goals. While for instance the IT team is following the lift & shift mission of the SAP landscape, the low-code developers are already starting rebuilding apps & processes with the help of Power Platform. Not only, that this lowers the IT backlog in total, it also speeds up the journey massively.

Lastly, to conclude on above visual, your internal sales to your CEO or CFO would contain the full business case where business value assessment would be added to a mitigation and imagination process. Just saying: „Our ERP System is old, maintenance tasks became more effort and we no longer could have support from the vendor due to end of lifecycle of the software“ isn´t enough any longer. You could also read about this in a recent Gartner research if you´re interested to learn more.

I´d be curious about your Cloud Transformation journey and if you do see these best practices being applied in your day-to-day business as well. Let me know in the comments or via email. Until then,…