Many businesses move to the cloud expecting game-changing benefits, but for many, those benefits never fully materialise. McKinsey estimates that cloud adoption could generate $3 trillion in global value by 2030, including operational cost savings, innovation-driven growth, IT savings, and digital risk reduction. However, IT leaders often complain that cloud costs more than expected and do not see enough value in it.
While public cloud gets the most attention in these conversations, we’ve seen similar struggles with private cloud. Companies make strategic investments, pick the right platforms, and still wonder why they’re not seeing real returns.
Working with our customers, we noticed a pattern. A set of common roadblocks was preventing businesses from realising cloud’s full potential. The good news? We have solved these challenges before, across multiple industries.
This is what led us to create Cloud Value Acceleration: an outcomes-oriented approach designed to help you rapidly discover and unlock the business benefits of cloud adoption.
Let’s explore the biggest opportunities to make cloud work better, the kind of value companies should expect, and how we’re making that happen.
Lifting, shifting and stalling
Many businesses move to the cloud out of necessity rather than careful planning. From our experience, once companies move beyond experimentation, they often choose a ‘lift-and-shift’ approach – also known as the ‘Rehost’ strategy from the popular 7 Rs of cloud migration. Simply put, this means transferring their workloads to the cloud exactly as they are, without making any changes.
The reason is usually straightforward: organisations decide to move their entire IT setup, racing to exit their data centres before renewals arrive. While there might be plans to fine-tune key workloads or create new cloud-native projects, these often get deprioritised in favour of swiftly moving everything to the cloud. The logic makes sense: migrate first, optimise later, to avoid the costs of running systems in parallel and dealing with outdated infrastructure.
But this is where many businesses can lose sight of their initial goals. The positive onward vision for what the organisation wanted to gain often disappears as the migration gains momentum. With IT teams busy shutting down old infrastructure, success is measured by how many workloads are moved, not by the value brought to the business. Even worse, this short-term focus can delay the adoption of automation, cloud-native operations and the essential skills needed for long-term success.
It's no coincidence that cloud adoption frameworks from all the major cloud players emphasise the need for a well-defined business case upfront. Migrations should be built on a solid operational foundation – not simply a technical one – and wholesale migration should be paired with a deliberate modernisation strategy. By clearly defining the business outcomes with expected gains from the start, and tracking against them throughout, companies can ensure they don’t just move to the cloud, they actually benefit from it.
Sources of cloud business value
So, what kinds of positive outcomes might we actually want to see from cloud adoption?
- Business innovation: We’ve found that for most of our customers, the cloud, and public cloud in particular, presents the single most impactful enabler of access to emerging technologies, adoption of AI and trialling new digital-native business models.
- Revenue growth through business agility: With the right approach, cloud maturity ought to lead directly to business growth, by allowing you to identify and address new digital revenue streams, scale your services to meet demand, and rapidly evolve your offerings to retain and grow volumes.
- Operational efficiency: Cloud maturity can help with streamlining processes to maximise productivity while minimising waste and cost.
- Cost savings: The premise of cloud technology is that you only use the infrastructure capacity you need and horizontally scale your services to handle peaks and troughs of demand.
- Becoming data-driven: Like other emerging technologies like AI, cloud technology is the gateway to better decision-making and new opportunities through data-driven insights
Releasing untapped value: the Endava approach
Cloud Value Acceleration is Endava’s outcomes-oriented approach to help you rapidly discover and unlock business benefits of cloud adoption. Let's walk through the approach step by step:
Step 1: Define outcomes
We start by assessing the ROI gap you currently face, the difference between the value you’re seeing today and where you ought to be. We use this to help you form a positive onward vision of your true potential in the cloud and what you want your company to gain from it.
Step 2: Set targets
Then, we use the onward vision to agree a set of primary business and IT outcomes to target, including the metrics that you’ll use to track success throughout the initiative. Here we define the actual approach to measuring and quantifying your business benefits, allowing us to set final exit criteria in terms of specific, measurable outcomes.
Step 3: Chart the path
We work with you to evolve your cloud operating model to deliver on your vision. This in turn informs a two-pronged tech strategy: we define target state capabilities of the core platform and a suite of more localised domain specific services, laying plans to close any gaps against this target state with the aid of our accelerators and enablers.
Step 4: Prove the vision
At Endava we believe firmly in the power of tailored, localised success as a conduit to scalable, lasting change. So, our primary implementation activities begin with carefully selected pilots of core and domain-specific capability to serve the needs of a specific, well-engaged early adopter community within your business. Pushing to demonstrate the art of the possible for these projects and business units, we help you build momentum for change through these streams of early success, continuously tracking and demonstrating the added value of your cloud investment.
Step 5: Unlock the value
Having laid the key groundwork and established your means to onward success, we work with you to deliver successive waves of value acceleration to all key areas of your cloud business, evolving and refining capabilities to adapt to the needs of new groups and continuing to track and prove value as you go.
Our customers have found that our Cloud Value Acceleration approach helps them quickly advance their thinking and really put their cloud investment to work. As we continue to help businesses around the world escape the cost centre trap and turbocharge their innovation, we’ll continue to share stories of their success and the techniques we’ve developed to net you a positive return on your cloud spend.
Are you ready to unlock the true value of the cloud for your company? Learn more about how our experts can help you reach your goals at Dava.X Cloud.