How to Persuade Your Company to Adopt the Cloud

Some background: it was 2018 in Europe, and banks across the world were terrified of running critical workloads on the cloud. They didn’t want to be responsible for data breaches and other security concerns, to be the reason key information wound up in the wrong places. Merely announcing that they were considering shifting key workloads to the cloud could be a blow to their security reputation.

On the other hand, there were a ton of companies that provided payment services such as allowing banks to facilitate money transfers in real time. As banking customers, we have all endured the unpleasant experience of waiting multiple days to see money in our account after a successful transfer. The possibility of immediate transfers via the cloud was therefore a significant opportunity, and a gap that my team and I saw the potential to bridge.

Yet, being a first mover would inflate risk for already terrified banks. If working on the cloud didn’t go well, if there was a data breach, this would be the first thing people would recall. So how could we convince them that they would be leaving behind a more progressive legacy instead? How did they go from being highly skeptical, to being the first bank in the world to publicly adopt cloud technology for critical workloads?

Using this experience as a case study, I’ll walk you through the steps my team and I took for this bank, and many others across the world. This first section highlights important groundwork you should start with. The following section walks you through steps you can use to start and scale, and to address common concerns. While the examples here relate to adopting cloud technology, the steps and lessons laid out below can be used to implement any change across your organization.

Start By Listening

To harness the power of the cloud on a meaningful scale, you’ll need to get buy-in from many stakeholders - from operations, to product and engineering, to finance, to legal, and naturally, compliance. Each of these stakeholders would have very different priorities and fears. As someone looking to get their company to utilize the cloud, it’s key that you take time to listen, and fully understand your stakeholders’ priorities, fears, and pain points.

As a proponent for cloud technology adoption, you’re likely to have spent time doing a great deal of research and have spoken to experts and peers in the field who have migrated to the cloud. You’d also have a better sense of brands and service providers you should trust. The reality is that the stakeholders and decision makers you need to convince don’t share this depth of understanding. At least not yet.

This is why taking time to define your stakeholders’ fears and goals is important. Getting specific helps you to address them at a later stage so that you can translate the benefits of cloud technology, or guide a trusted expert to translate, in a way that matters to your stakeholders. Most people are likely to highlight benefits to get buy-in. As Henry Ford said, “If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own.” Doing this work up front gives you the opportunity to reframe benefits so that your stakeholders are able to see exactly how it would solve their specific concerns.

Listening to them also gives you a sense of what the more challenging projects would be, and what to avoid when you’re making your initial pitch. Say your stakeholders have pressing issues like customer retention that they want resolved. They would be significantly more likely to consider your solution if you are able to demonstrate how the cloud could offer a safe, cost-effective, quick and reliable means to address one of their top issues.

Not Win/Lose

To a smaller degree, institutions may be resistant to change because of capital expenses that they’ve already incurred. This includes investment in capital outlay for data centers, and concerns from teams responsible for these resources about the corresponding impact (e.g. jobs and budget that might be lost) as a result of a move to the cloud.

To address these concerns, I’ve found it useful to remind companies that it isn’t an either-or situation. While the cloud offers benefits, the reality is that there is data that really shouldn’t be put on a public cloud depending on the nature of the business. Their capital investments and data centers won’t be made obsolete as cloud adoption could be a phased approach. After you’ve stressed this, highlight key areas that the cloud could help your company with. Show them how it complements existing infrastructure investments so that they can see why co-existing with the cloud is a positive change.

The biggest concern banks (and other enterprises) have in adopting cloud technology, in my experience, has been the risk involved. Digital transformation is a big change. Accept their concerns, even if they aren’t logical or valid to you. If you’re trying to get the leaders in a company to see value in making the shift, start small in a relatively risk-free setting.

For the project in adopting cloud technology for the bank in Europe, my team and I first piloted a solution in a siloed environment. Being relatively detached from the rest of the organization’s operations helped to reduce risk. If things didn’t go so well, any impact would be contained – and this helped ease the client’s fears. With the pilot, we were able to measure and show cost savings and other benefits that using cloud technology allowed. This proof of concept made all the difference. Once the bank had positive concrete results, they were more open to adopt cloud technology in different areas.

This worked because the concrete data we gathered allowed us to ‘de-risk’ the situation. With data, the bank had proof that it was safe to transact on the cloud. They could see that it was faster to transact on the cloud. More importantly, they saw how it reduced their costs. It gave them a viable alternative to processing payments without having to build and maintain data centres. It freed up resources to focus on servicing their customers and generating revenue.

In incremental steps, we continually delivered concrete, positive results. This helped us to build trust and expand the scope of what cloud technology was used for, while minimizing any risk the bank had to take on. In time, the bank gave us the green light to use cloud technology on one of their core services – payments. Because of past successes, we were able to convince them that partnering with an independent software vendor (ISV) at this stage would allow them to quickly and cost-effectively achieve their goal of enabling real-time transactions across Europe. This resulted in the first ever publicly announced cloud deal for payments, and in turn prompted other banks and companies to be more open to using cloud technology, especially for heavily regulated industries like finance.

Start (Very) Small

If you’re trying to pitch the idea of using cloud technology to very risk averse individuals, start small. Really, really small. It could be simply getting buy-in to back up your organization’s data on the cloud for disaster recovery. Your end goal might be bigger, and that’s fine. The point at this stage is simply to get buy-in to start.

If your pilot project is successful, great. Scale up from there with a slightly larger and more impactful solution, for example deploying chatbots for customer self-help. Chatbots (or conversational AI) might seem like a big investment, but you don’t necessarily have to build one from scratch. There are options like ready made solutions available on cloud marketplaces or baseline cognitive services offered by cloud providers that can be customized by your organization. If you’re working for an MNC, getting funding from cloud providers to use specific services like chatbots, or exploring how you can deepen your cloud presence, is not uncommon. Depending on the solutions you want to build, product and engineering teams at cloud providers can get involved and help with your product roadmap and implementation.

If you prefer to build, you can develop in-house or get a system integrator to build it for you. The range of solutions (build versus buy, outsource versus develop in-house, small initiatives such as disaster recovery or going all-in on the cloud) is also a key reason why front loading your research in the earlier stages makes a difference. If you did the leg work, you would understand the core priorities of your immediate leadership team and other decision makers over quarters and fiscal years, and have a clearer idea of what resources you would have on hand. This, in turn, helps you to select and pitch the right solution to start with.

In addition, doing research would make it clearer to identify a relatively easy, low risk start for your stakeholders. It’s a little like trying to develop a habit – starting is the toughest part. Once you get your foot in the door, make incremental changes and measure improvements at each stage. This provides proof that using the cloud can be a safe, reliable and effective solution. Like the case of the bank in Europe, having tangible benefits such as a market differentiating solution, additional revenue earned and improved customer retention helps you to make a case for using cloud technology increasingly. Cloud providers also provide assistance with go-to-market initiatives such as case-studies, press releases, conference spotlights and other engagements that can elevate your company’s profile and let them be seen as industry leaders.

1 Do Deep Research and Know Your Stakeholders

Understand the key priorities, fears and pain points your many stakeholders will have. This groundwork will help you to address different reasons they may have for resisting the cloud, and communicate how benefits from the cloud can help their specific needs.

2 Start Small And Scale

Even something as small as making a local back-up to the cloud for disaster recovery. Get buy-in to use the technology, even if there isn’t a clear relation to the digital transformation you seek to make. Simply start, use the resulting positive impact as proof for going bigger on the cloud, and take small steps to scale your company’s cloud presence.

3 Measure Results To Make Your Case

Use data to show the tangible benefits of cloud technology. ‘Savings of $XX million over YY quarters’ makes a far more compelling case than ‘reduced costs’. Give senior management or prospective clients concrete reasons to take more risks for commensurate rewards.