Digital transformation triggers

The reason to adopt any disruptive technology, especially one that can have a business impact, needs to start with a trigger relevant to the stakeholder’s pain points or objectives and any business operations or technical operations drivers. This move often begins with a business directive-led discussion rather than a technology-led one; a business leader will always ask a technology leader what the benefits are, not what the features are.

Once triggers have been identified, an approach can be planned; you can think of the triggers as the why and the approach as the how.

The following illustration outlines some of the business-led as well as technology-led triggers for digital transformation initiatives:

Figure 2.3 – Digital transformation triggers

In this section, we looked at digital transformation triggers. The following section looks at the migration approach.

Migration approach

The next step in the transformation journey is to understand the processes, methods, and services that could be used to execute the transition to cloud services; this is outlined in the following list:

  1. Phase 1 | Assess – This phase is an exercise in understanding the business operations and technical operations of an organization. It starts with discovery, which provides an inventory of apps, data, infrastructure, and, critically, any dependencies. This will help evaluate the best strategy to take for each area of the captured inventory.

Example services: Azure Migrate Assessments.

  • Phase 2 | Move – This phase is the physical exercise of moving inventory items to their cloud services target, for instance, moving to SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, or serverless cloud computing services.

Example services: Azure Migrate Migrations, Azure Blueprints.

  • Phase 3 | Optimize – This phase will occur after a period of bedding-in, typically a period of months; this may include right-sizing activities to better suit the workload for costs and performance benefits.

Example services: Azure Advisor, Azure Cost Management.

  • Phase 4 | Secure and Manage – This is an ongoing operations phase and should include governance and control, security, and the protection of the network, app, data, and identities.

Example services: Azure Monitor, Azure Security Center, Azure Defender, Microsoft Cloud App Security, Azure Policy, Azure Sentinel, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Firewall, Azure App Gateway, and Azure Front Door.

The Azure services listed in the preceding list will be covered in more detail later in this book.

This section looked at the migration approach. The following section looks at the audience of cloud computing.