As its cloud journey matures, the bank should establish a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCE) that brings together inhouse high performers and forward thinkers. Along with the right cloud consulting partner, the CCE will steer cloud efforts throughout the organization, maintain momentum and advocate for adoption. Team members will evaluate workloads for cloud suitability, and become the go-to people to deliver and support the cloud strategy, ensuring an agile, iterative, horizontal capacity.

Communication is key to building momentum for cloud adoption. Support the CCE with a clear communication strategy. This will help build a process and culture that accelerates cloud adoption. Too often, poor communication hampers cloud success – and makes the CCE's work unnecessarily difficult. There's not a single IT problem that cloud technology can't solve. If cloud providers don't already have the solution, they can build it. But communication is important to overcoming the people- and process-based challenges that can derail cloud initiatives.