• Initiation and Business Strategy Phase.  The objective of the initial phase is to clearly which business goals the company is pursuing with the Cloud, identify stakeholders and define the metrics which are to be used to measure the status of the projects, the benefits and the degree of compliance regarding the business goals.
• Assessment and Requirements Phase. According to the business goals and the scope of the current and future IT landscapes, during this phase both a workload and cloud readiness assessment must be performed, which outcome will be the key deliverables to understand what would be designed, planned and implemented. This is by far the most important phase of a cloud migration, and possible the most complex one. Results from this phase is key for a correct selection of Cloud models and Cloud elements, but also the state of readiness of all elements of the IT and business ecosystem is assessed, so that according to the results, different plans and actions have to be planned and later performed and tested so that the organization is completely ready for the changes. Some of the activities within this phase include System Workload Analysis, Cloud Readiness Assessment at all levels, User Readiness, SLAs, Integration, Compliance, Security and others.
• Transformational Design Phase. In this phase, the Cloud components and service types are selected based on previous assessment and requirements, and with them you will design the model of Cloud Computing that you´re going to implement (or just some). The final model might look like a hybrid model, mainly for those companies that have their own data centers and on premises systems and applications. You will probably want or better, you might need your new or migrated cloud services to be well integrated with some of the private applications, which are not yet to be migrated to Cloud. In this phase you will also plan for a new governance model for the new IT services, Security, integration technology or even your training needs and several others according to the reach of your migration project.
• Solution Implementation and Deployment. This last phase is either one or several subprojects according to the scope and goals. This is the phase for the setup, configuration, implementation and deployment of the different Cloud Elements or services that have been designed in the previous phase. Each specific solution must be deployed according to the general plan. There might be different approaches for these subprojects, as it´s not exactly the same to implement an Enterprise Cloud email solution (SaaS) than a Human Resources recruiting software (SaaS) than to migrate your SAP ERP to Microsoft Azure Compute Services (IaaS).

Additionally, this methodological framework includes activity stream that spans across all phases, like the strategic project management and the organization change management. Once a migration project or adoption is deployed and implemented, it will be the time for measuring results and comparing with the metrics and goals that were initially established.