Royal Holloway, University of London shares their journey to the cloud

Key takeaways

  • With a sound business case you can always find future costs, investment in infrastructure and investment in particular skills that you won't have to make in that migration to cloud
  • Make sure you have a solid understanding of everything about your current platform
  • Work with an established vendor and partner that you trust and start with something that you understand and know well

Michael Johnson - Chief Information Officer, Royal Holloway, University of London

The lessons that we've learnt from the journey so far to the cloud, across a number of our platforms, are really about knowing yourself well. I would advise anyone starting off on this journey to make sure they've got a really solid understanding of everything about their current platform; what is it that they're looking to migrate to the cloud, how are they going to do that. Have complete lists of any modifications, customisations, integrations; anything that could potentially trip you up further down the line.

I think the other thing to bear in mind is justifying the potential cost of cloud and moving away from a capital spend model to an operating spend model can be quite challenging particularly with our colleagues in finance, but working hard at business cases you can always find future costs, investment in infrastructure and potentially investment in particular skills that you won't have to make in that migration to cloud.

My top tips for any institutions considering a journey to the cloud would be to know yourself, know your environment really well, have it thoroughly documented and well understood. Make sure the commercials are right and that they're right for you. Understand the full economic cost of what you're running on premise and what the costs will be when you made that migration. Work with an established partner; work with a vendor that you trust and start with something that you understand and know well.

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