You can find lots of studies that show the cloud is growing by leaps and bounds in the enterprise. That's not surprising. What is surprising are some of the dumb mistakes being made that are killing cloud progress. Let's look at a few of my top 10.
Cloud mistake No. 1: Lack of funding
This is so high in my screw-up-o-meter! You can't change IT on the cheap. Consulting, training, cloud instances used for testing, and even money to fix screw-ups are absolute requirements -- so budget for them.
Enterprises try to migrate to the cloud as if it were a zero-sum game. That doesn't work. You will get the cost savings, but you have to spend some money first to get to the more efficient and agile states that will save you the real money. If you won't spend the money up front, you'll die the death of a thousand cuts.
Cloud mistake No. 2: Failure to win over hearts and minds
People who push back on cloud for sound reasons provide a certain degree of healthy skepticism. However, if the majority of the team does not get the advantages of cloud, you won't have a team that's motivated to get the things done that you need done. Also, they are unlikely to have the right skills.
The people issue is sensitive. In many cases, they don't want to be retrained, and management does not want to swap them out. Thus, they may remain as roadblocks to progress. If that's the case, you're unlikely to succeed.
Cloud mistake No. 3: Letting tools and technology lead the day
In my consulting work, the key questions I get revolve around Amazon Web Services versus Microsoft, or what are the best devops tools. That technology tool set is a very small part of the game.
Holistic planning is more important. You need to understand your own business and its requirements. Then and only then do you select the technology.
I know, I know: What fun is that? Most IT shops go right for the research and pick technology that it thinks it'll need. But this leads to bad solutions and no understanding of the core requirements. You can certainly have your fun with the technology itself -- but only after you know what you need to do with it.
No matter how well you plan your cloud migration, you're likely to make some mistakes. That always happens. But these three mistakes will kill your cloud plans -- or make you hit the reset button, and lose all that time and money. Instead, be smart and avoid these problems in the first place.