Here are the top factors to consider when building your cloud transformation strategy: Business objectives and goals: Your business objectives and goals will dictate how you approach your transformation strategy.  Current IT infrastructure assessment: The gap between your current IT infrastructure and where you want it to be will determine your transformation strategy.  Security and compliance requirements: Your industry will dictate your compliance requirements and what security measures fit within your strategy.  Budget and cost considerations: A cloud transformation is an investment — but it should still be done with a budget in mind. Skill set of the current IT team: Your IT team will need to keep up with your transformation plans, or you’ll need to add to your team in order to do so. Plan to provide upskill training to your IT team or identify a third-party IT consulting company or management provider to overcome skill gaps on your IT team. Data privacy issues: Sensitive data and information must be kept safe throughout the entire transformation process.  Scalability and flexibility: Your cloud transformation strategy should align with overall goals for scalability and flexibility.  Migration strategy and timeline: If you need to be more aggressive with your migration timeline, this will influence your overall strategy.  Vendor selection and support considerations: Choose IT vendors that meet your support needs and can help you through changing business demands. Change management strategy: Match your transformation strategy to align with change management needs and keep your team invested in upcoming changes.  User adoption strategy: Include your user adoption strategy with your transformation strategy to appropriately pace new content and changes to not overwhelm your team.  Integration with existing systems and processes: Include how existing systems and processes will fit within your cloud transformation strategy.  Potential downtime and operational impact during migration: Work into your plan how migration downtime will impact your operations and how those challenges will be solved.  Post-migration support and optimization plans: Create and document plans for providing support and ongoing optimization after migration within your strategy.  Alignment with industry standards and best practices: Your industry will have unique best practices or standards that will ultimately influence your strategy.  Customer and user experience considerations: Your strategy should reflect the needs of your customers and end-users.  Long-term ROI: Think about your long-term goals and return on your investment when building your strategy.