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In recent years, much has been made of the ¡°journey to the cloud.¡± There is good reason for the enthusiasm ¡ª the cloud has become a vital tool for businesses of all sizes due to the flexibility and security it offers (among other benefits). But it bears remembering that it is indeed a tool rather than a destination in itself, and there are numerous factors to consider before diving in full speed ahead. Cloud adoption without a well-defined business strategy and framework can spell trouble, leaving businesses marooned without any of the agility they had hoped to gain.

Some of the areas that require scrutiny before cloud adoption include business objectives, people, governance, platform, security, operations, technology, products, and scalability. A robust cloud adoption framework (CAF) offers a way to reduce risk and get the most out of an investment in cloud technology, whatever line of business you are in ¡ª including, of course, chip design.

What Is a Cloud Adoption Framework, and How Does it Help?

In simple terms, a CAF refers to the assembly of documents, tools, practices, and implementation procedures necessary not just to accelerate cloud adoption, but to do it in a way that will work for your business. With a CAF in place, a company is better positioned to identify opportunities for transformation and organize its business and technical strategies.

From an electronic design automation (EDA) perspective, a CAF helps improve adherence to security and reliability standards, thereby reducing business risk. It can also support environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals by helping businesses apply virtualization to reduce the number of physical servers necessary as well as reduce power consumption. 

Since EDA tools are multifaceted (with different requirements in terms of compute power), migration to the cloud can become complicated very quickly. A CAF helps designers ensure that different types of necessary compute are accessible in the cloud for all stages of the design cycle.

Practical Steps Toward Effective Cloud Adoption

Effective CAFs take into account a wide range of use cases spanning technology, organization, process, and product. This foundation offers guidance in migrating and modernizing infrastructure, applications, and analytics platforms, as well as supporting digitalization and automation. While no two cloud adoption scenarios are the same, there are four key stages that will apply to most organizations.

The first step is to define a clear business strategy. This means understanding the value that cloud migration brings and having metrics in place to measure the success of cloud adoption. Financial modeling is an important part of this process to ensure all parties are on board and aligned.

Having established the strategy, develop a plan to follow. This likely involves listing out workloads, applications, data sources, virtual machines, and other assets to evaluate the extent of cloud usage and its composition. It is advisable to set an agenda with the most impactful and technically complex workloads at the top. A support plan will factor in organizational needs, potential gaps, and new technologies.

The third stage is the main event: adopting the cloud. The migration process will see on-premise applications move incrementally. It pays to engage the expertise of personnel who understand and have experience with data migration. For chip design companies, this talent might not be readily available internally. This is also the stage to think carefully about how the company might upgrade its digital real estate to drive innovation, such as through infrastructure deployment, operations, and governance. The key is to unite operations and development.

The final part of the process is to manage the cloud adoption framework. This involves establishing benchmarks and practices and highlighting areas of risk. Effective benchmarking is a way to plug gaps in migration and evaluate governance on an ongoing basis. In this case, a multi-cloud environment might be preferable as it allows for greater flexibility than a single cloud. At the same time, while providers are enhancing their security all the time, the more complex a system, the more challenging it is to protect. Governance practice evolves over time, but it starts with implementing a minimally viable product based on security, cost, resources, and deployment automation.

In terms of management, a successful operation will combine monitoring with analysis of dependencies, critical business operations, and resilience. There is also a strong need for collaboration; cloud adoption teams must be able to work with other teams to form an environment that makes tools and solutions readily available to those who need them.