Forrester reported only one-third of IT decision-makers have a formal cloud operations plan and that they need to prioritize aligning cloud migration with their business vision and value.

“Too often, tech leaders go back and forth on cloud choices and build out a cloud plan in pieces,” the Forrester report noted. “But they never develop a cohesive cloud strategy that focuses on how cloud delivers business value.”

For IT decision-makers to use the cloud successfully, the analyst firm suggests they “put every cloud decision up against their business strategy,” regardless of their organization’s maturity level. This includes analyzing how much business value can be derived from building a private cloud platform versus leveraging one from a public cloud vendor or from operating cloud-native applications on-premises instead of migrating them. 

Additionally, Forrester says because the prospect of cloud migration presents so many options and can quickly become complex, it’s important for decision-makers to “be clear about the business value that complexity delivers.”

“Priorities should focus more on speed-to-market, improved customer experience, reduced capital costs, and streamlined developer experience and less on perfecting long-term architectural decisions,” the report said. “This also means defining where your team will enforce rigid standardization and where it will provide increased flexibility.”

Forrester found the ability to scale quickly and easily is the top driver (41%) for migrating to a cloud computing infrastructure for IT decision-makers. 

Those surveyed also cited the benefits of managed services from cloud service providers (40%), freeing up IT staff for other tasks (37%), fastest time to deployment (36%), and shifting focus away from infrastructure (30%) as important drivers for getting to the cloud. 

Forrester indicated that ultimately, the migration to cloud requires cultural change even more so than a technical shift. The report added, “Cloud-native technologies will add little value if the practices and systems around them are not modernized.”

This applies to architectures, processes, governance, skills, financing, and licensing, according to Forrester. Organizations that only invest in cloud technology without changing practices and internal systems will see increased cost with little added value and “more challenges in manageability and observability.”

Cultural changes require attention to relationships between “the governed and the governors,” Forrester said, adding “governance remains a fairly new concept, as organizations have focused more on the speed and flexibility cloud delivers.”

Decision-makers (the governors) should work collectively with employees, vendors, and partners (the governed) to build a shared governance model to ensure positive worker experience and reduce “inefficiency and risk at scale.”

The Forrester report also found 62% of decision-makers said “modernizing with cloud and new computing architectures” would be their top hardware, IT infrastructure, and IT operations priority over the next 12 months.

But Forrester explained adopting cloud-native technologies can’t solve all the modernization problems today’s organizations are facing. “Defaulting to the cloud as the first thought disregards the unique strengths that other computing platforms have to offer,” the report said. 

Certain platforms can be more useful if you can modernize the practices and policies around them, but standardizing on cloud for everything can cause diminished user experience, performance issues, compliance violations, escalated costs, latency, or supplier concentration risks. 

Overall, Forrester said customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) will measure the success of an organization’s migration to cloud. 

“In an era of increasing digital sameness, cloud itself is not the key differentiator,” the firm said. “It’s a cloud strategy that provides the launchpad for innovation.”

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