Before the Cloud, enterprise systems required on-premises applications, five-year adoption cycles, technical upgrades, and a long lag. Now, with Oracle Cloud, you can operate with Cloud applications, quarterly adoption, constantly updated features and technology, and an immediate feedback loop. In this article we’ll explore 10 Laws to make your On-Premises to Cloud Migration transition easier.

“Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.” – Steve Jobs

We live in a constantly changing technological world. New technology leads to new products, new products lead to new business models, new business models lead to a new normal, and then the new normal leads back to new technology, and the cycle goes on.

The entry of millennials into the workforce brings digital natives to almost all organizations, and continuing to use systems and processes from the past is not conducive to productivity. Around the world, companies are seeking opportunities to leverage technology in the best possible way—where outcomes are achieved quickly, intelligently, and easily.

Today, instead of losing capability as your on-premise solution goes out of date, you can constantly increase capability with the continuously improving Cloud.

In response to digital opportunities, 89% of business leaders are planning on-premises to cloud migration. The benefits they most look forward to include:

• Staying current on technology – 85%
• Usability benefits – 75%
• Increased flexibility – 71%
• Economic benefits – 70%
• Being able to display faster – 68%

As organizations begin on-premises to cloud migration projects, they will follow five steps: Prepare > Implement > Verify > Ready > Deliver. These steps are comprised of 10 laws.

10 Laws of On-Premises to Cloud Migration Projects

Here are the 10 laws of projects involving migrating on-premise applications to the Cloud.

1. Law of Executive Sponsor Impact: Enlist an executive sponsor who has major company influence.
2. Law of Budgets and Resources: Ensure budget for staff and associated resources to deliver a successful project and satisfied users across the enterprise.
3. Law of Partner Involvement: When companies migrate to Cloud without a partner, they have hired the wrong partner. Engage the right partner before project kickoff and leverage their experience and expertise.
4. Law of Adopting Modern Business Processes: Don’t copy and paste on-premise business processes to the cloud. Start with fresh modern best practices.
5. Law of Proactive Change Management: Companies always encounter resistance to change regardless of applications or technology. Manage change before the change occurs.
6. Law of Customization Avoidance: Personalization and configurations are always first, second, and third priority over customizations.
7. Law of Good Data Management: Good data strategies require multiple threads, including an aggressive archive strategy, a purge plan, well-defined dictionary and data conversion.
8. Law of Human Testing: The Cloud still requires testing (but far less compared to on-premise). User acceptance training with actual end users is project insurance.
9. Law of User Training & Orientation: Users still need training before go-live. With cloud applications, training focuses on orientation, process and intuition rather than traditional click-a-button step by step task instruction.
10. Law of Embracing Continuous Innovation: Go-live and adopt a culture of continuous innovation to stay ahead of the curve.

Following the list above will make on-premises to cloud migration easy and manageable. While many people get hung up at the Law of Customization Avoidance due to a history of many customizations, concern may not be necessary. For example, when a customer came to the table with 13,947 customizations, the Oracle team found that only 13 of the requests were customizations that the Cloud environment wasn’t able to do. With 5,500 Oracle Cloud customers, the internal team managed to identify common customization requests and build them into the basic system.

For further info, Quest members may be interested in this Cloud migrations Do’s and Dont’s whitepaper.