How to Choose a Partner for Your Cloud Journey

Is your organization ready to fully embrace cloud technology? Are you overburdened by projects that you know cloud could solve but find it difficult to build a roadmap? If so, then it’s time to find a cloud partner that can propel your business to the next stage of its journey (and beyond).

That said, the growing prevalence of cloud means there are more partners than ever before — and all of them claim to have the best approach for your business. With so many options, you may be tempted to pick one at random and hope for the best. But no two partners are alike, and you want to ensure whoever you go with is best positioned to meet your needs.

To that end, according to Nicholas Polachek, Managing Director, Cloud Advisory N.A., here’s what every business leader needs to know before choosing a partner for their cloud journey.

Assess your current cloud needs

If you’re at the beginning of your cloud journey, then there’s a chance you haven’t spent too much time planning and setting up your cloud transformation objectives. If that sounds familiar, engaging a service provider to help with upfront planning can help accelerate your cloud journey.

That said, many other business leaders have already embarked on their cloud journey. In these instances, some common industry challenges that a partner can help with include:

• Developing an overall roadmap for teams with lots of scattered, cloud-related projects
• Producing successful ROI cases based on projected cost savings
• An increase in cloud consumption without seeing business benefits (e.g., faster time to market, improved analytics, lower cost)
• Struggling with cloud adoption and organization transformation 
• Navigating challenges brought on by legacy systems that make it difficult to implement visionary ideas

• A lack of business engagement (i.e., transformation that is predominantly driven and owned by IT)
• Struggling modernization efforts — despite SaaS and native cloud projects going well.
• Sluggish and ineffective strategies for bringing new ideas to market
• Messy change management
• Implementing a scaled cloud security model

Seek a partner with the right resumé

Next, take a look at your potential partner’s past projects. While industry experience is important, almost all large global system integrators have strong industry experience. Alternatively, experience working with a client who is an industry cloud leader can be a differentiating factor.

As a client, you should look for partners who understand how the cloud enables better outcomes like time to market, access to data, developer experience, and customer experience.  Understanding the implications to the software delivery and operations processes and people is critical to deriving value from the cloud.

Additionally, you should look for partners who have a strong relationship with public cloud providers. Most large-scale cloud transformations are a partnership between you, the hyperscaler, and the services partner. A strong services partner can help you navigate that hyperscaler relationship.

Ask the right questions

A client should talk to potential partners about their latest thinking on how to leverage the value of cloud. A few questions to ask any potential cloud partner include:

• What projects has your organization worked on that had similar end goals to mine?
• What lessons did your organization learn from those projects? How will that carry over to my project?
• How might your company’s core values influence our partnership? (A partner whose core values are client-centric will create the best outcome.)

Ultimately, you’ll know you’ve picked the right cloud partner if the two of you share an aligned vision, a focus on outcomes, and mutual trust. These are the essential markers of any strong partnership and will be a winning combination for years to come.

If you’re looking for a partner to help you understand how to leverage the cloud most effectively, Maven Wave can help. Our team will assess your current technology footprint and business objectives to plan a cloud transformation that creates real value for your business. You can also learn more about our services here. Contact us if you’d like to schedule a time to connect with our experts.