Organizations of virtually every size are adopting dynamic and cloud-based infrastructures to drive innovation in today’s digital economy. But as traditional infrastructures are not going away in the near term, cloud adoption is fueling infrastructure complexity.

As part of a recent launch of new capabilities for cloud monitoring, CA hosted a virtual webcast with CIO Online to highlight some key challenges and provide actionable insights for organizations on their cloud journey.

Here are some of my key takeaways after listening to industry experts and practitioners.

A cloud center of excellence can speed adoption and ROI:  Stephen Orban (head of global enterprise strategy at AWS) talked about how forming a diverse team with a strong cross-functional focus can help you create the right hybrid infrastructure strategy for your business and ensure ongoing execution. This group would also spread best practices across the organization to ensure that every group is maximizing the value of the cloud.

Unified cloud and traditional infrastructure view improves visibility and validates migration success:  Ali Siddiqi (general manager of the Cloud and Enterprise Management business unit at CA Technologies), highlighted how typically as organizations adopt cloud and new technologies, they also end of up accumulating multiple monitoring and management tools across hybrid, complex infrastructures. This not only results in lack of end-to-end visibility into user experience, it also hampers cloud adoption since IT teams have to learn new tools and are unable to get the deep insights they need to optimize cloud performance. Ali shared how CA’s customers had improved staff productivity, mean time to repair and cloud adoption by unifying traditional infrastructure and cloud monitoring.

Your cloud approach needs to think about users first: Different application groups have different needs. Each might require a public or private cloud platform that suits their unique needs. Zafir Yousaf (Cloud Transformation lead at Telefonica) talked about how IT teams need to manage a holistic set of cloud services that offer the flexibility that their users require.

Calibrate and automate to maximize cloud potential:  There are quite a few options in terms of cloud platforms and the capabilities offered for IT teams. Kevin Langford (director of Managed Services at Sirius Computer Solutions) suggested that IT teams needed to understand these capabilities and then calibrate their strategy and automate provisioning of the selected services to maximize benefits.

Manage expectations for the cloud: While typical expectations of the cloud are certainly tangible and achievable, it’s not always easy getting to success. During cloud migrations traditional IT infrastructures and architectures have to be taken into account and evolved. IT needs to portray this to management teams and manage expectations accordingly. It will bring success but not overnight. Arnold Hoogerwerf (IT Strategy Consultant at KPN) brought up this invaluable insight during the panel discussion.

Match business drivers to the right platform, but it has to be “invisible”: Steve Kaplan (vice president of Client Strategy at Nutanix) emphasized how he has always recommended his customers match the business objectives of applications or initiatives to the appropriate platform (public, private or on-premise). But he also highlighted how user expectations have changed. Even if it were on-premise infrastructure, they still expected the same level of simplicity as a public cloud-based infrastructure. The goal is to make the IT infrastructure (on-premise or cloud) so simple that it’s “invisible.”

Which of the above tips and practices can you relate to? What would you add? Feel free to give me a shout on Twitter.

Want more insights and best practices for adopting cloud based infrastructure? Watch the CIO event recording here.

The post Six keys to propelling cloud adoption success appeared first on Highlight.