Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: Ineffective KPIs

Welcome to part four of our five part series, Major Pitfalls to Avoid During Cloud Adoption.

Cloud adoption provides many benefits but before you embark on your journey, it is critical to evaluate your goals and ensure that KPIs align with those goals.

Pitfall: Not Defining KPIs that Align with Cloud Adoption Goals

Many organizations track the number of applications migrated to the cloud as a key performance indicator during an application migration project. However, is moving all targeted applications the real goal of cloud adoption?

Application migration is the journey to different cloud adoption goals of cost efficiency, high availability, rapid delivery, and application stability, which are the most effective KPIs to be measured.

Solution to Pitfall 4: Define KPIs that Align with Cloud Adoption Goals

Cloud adoption is an investment. To justify and track the investment, it is important to illustrate the goals of cloud adoption with trackers in the form of relevant KPIs. For example, many organizations adopt the cloud to support high availability, then relevant KPIs will be the up-time of the application, the mean time to recovery of the application after an outage and the amount of unplanned downtime. The KPIs not only track the progress of cloud adoption, but they are also indicators of whether further investments should be made after the applications are migrated to the cloud.

On the other end of the spectrum, it is tempting to track too many KPIs, especially when so many of them represent benefits to adopting the cloud. However, too many KPIs may result in analysis paralysis on what features to invest in to maximize improvement across the maximum number of KPIs. That may lead to the pitfall of the perfect platform again. It is more effective by tracking KPI against the main bottleneck (the goal); after improvement, reexamine the system and identify the next bottleneck such that the teams can see momentum through the progressing KPI, and be continuously engaged in growing and maturing the cloud platform.

For more of the series, check out:

Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: Focusing Solely on Applications

Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: Perfection as the Enemy of Progress

Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: A Siloed Approach

Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: Ineffective KPIs

Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: Spiralling Out Cloud Costs