Seven persistent patterns driving cloud adoption today

We are three authors of The Cloud Adoption Playbook: Proven Strategies for Transforming Your Organization with the Cloud, published in 2018. We had two objectives in writing the book. First, we wanted to make the case that enterprises could adopt cloud computing as a path to business transformation. Second, we wanted to capture and share the approaches we were using in our consulting and implementation work with large IBM clients.

We’ve never believed that transformation could be reduced to a repeatable recipe. But we did want to write about common “patterns” in cloud adoption—the challenges we were encountering the most frequently, and the ones that seemed to have the greatest effect on successful execution.

The patterns we explore here are far from exhaustive. We don’t cover platforms, for instance, because that topic warrants a much deeper exploration. The same goes for Kubernetes and containers, distributed cloud, edge computing, 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning. These technological innovations make new kinds of enterprises that run on the cloud possible. But it’s important to keep in mind that constantly emerging technologies are all part of a bigger picture where high performance requires an equal level of management innovation. 

In this report, we reflect on our completed client work since 2018 and ask, “What has changed in the way our clients are approaching cloud adoption? What patterns have persisted? What new approaches are working to address those patterns?” The seven patterns we address in this report are:

1. Extending the business value of cloud across the entire enterprise
2. Balancing the old with the new
3. Modernizing mainframes and data centers
4. Coping with compliance requirements
5. Implementing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and similar practices
6. Improving the experience of the cloud service user
7. Navigating the skills precipice.

Read the full report to learn how these patterns can inform your company’s cloud adoption process and help deliver more business value.