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.