What are the best cloud strategies for aligning with your organizational goals?

Assess and evaluate your current cloud adoption state to identify improvement areas. You can select a public, private, or hybrid cloud model that best aligns with your business objectives. Establish governance policies to maintain compliance and security and foster a culture of cloud adoption among stakeholders. Ensure organizational structures and staffing support your cloud goals. Regularly reviewing and fine-tuning these elements ensures the continuous alignment of cloud strategies with corporate objectives.

To support the assessment, categorizing your infrastructure will smooth out the upcoming process. Using the big 3 categories; IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, will simplify the plan of how to tackle your infrastructure. You can then dive into the details of each category with a clearer vision of your cloud transformation. You can then assess the ROI, security, data and governance to start with the best plan. Moving to the cloud does not necessarily require you to move all at once.

The great thing about the cloud is that any of these models work. Public clouds generally offer the best bang for the buck. This is mainly due to the fact that they are the most widely used. This comes with the benefit of "Economy of Scale". Short version, "many users lead to savings for many users". Private clouds have 2 flavors. Private internal or external. Internal is run by you. This means you don't leverage a cloud vendor (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.). It's your data-center. External means you leverage the private networking provided by a public cloud. This shouldn't be confused with the hybrid approach. Hybrid combines your self-hosted services with the cloud. You might host your API while the cloud hosts your long/short term storage.

Choosing the right cloud model—public, private, hybrid, or multi-cloud—is a nuanced decision that goes beyond merely transferring assets or 'lifting and shifting'. It necessitates a robust comprehension of complex cloud primitives and a reevaluation and redesign of organizational strategies and technical architectures. A mere relocation of resources doesn’t suffice; a holistic transformation involving enhancement of organizational skills, fostering agility and collaboration, and optimizing technical architectures for modularity and resilience is imperative for leveraging the full spectrum of cloud benefits and navigating its complexities effectively.

Start with the diagram. It's the easiest way to see where you are. You just need shapes on a page. Let's go with the hybrid approach for this one. I like to start by creating 3 general buckets. On-site, cloud and touch-points. On-site covers any services hosted from your office/data-centers. This can be apps like Sharepoint, self-hosted repos (Gitlab) all the way to email. Cloud is ALL services, no matter their impact, that you're using in the cloud. This one is straightforward. If it's going to be on your cloud invoice it belongs on the diagram. Finally, touch-points covers any place where on-site and cloud connect/overlap. This can be application gateways, storage, Virtual Machines, etc. Any place information is passed between the two.

Migrating your workloads is the fun part. This is an exercise in what can go up to the cloud. First, infosec and governance likely have the final say here, depending on organization structure and type. There are 3 flavors. Lift-n-shift, refactor and rebuild. There's no right or wrong here. It depends on platform size, how comfortable your team is with cloud concepts, intention and time. Lift-n-shift, an as-is migration. This relies heavily on virtual machines. Basically taking local machines and sending them to the cloud. Refactor is lift-n-shift with some changes to adapt to the cloud. It may see the organization dipping into cloud first services. A rebuild moves you into a cloud first state. The term Serverless might be thrown around.

If you have a governance team they should be onboard at this point. This is the time where they should be considering cloud moving forward in their decision making. Saying yes or no to an aspect of cloud, how does that affect the organization. Is there such a thing as too much logging. Not really especially when it comes to the cloud. How you monitor is key. Using source logging, cloud native services or some combination thereof. The more services you use the more logging you need. Take some time to structure it so it makes sense. Automation takes a number of forms in the cloud. Creating/destroying resources, reacting to events and protecting against disaster. Automation should keep costs down, be repeatable and allow for quick recovery.

One of the best ways to achieve this is to simply show the value of the cloud. Keep in mind that not everyone at the organization will use it. For instance, a group within the org that uses internal tools that will not be migrated to the cloud. They don't have any need for it. Understand that some of your organization will adopt a cloud first mentality and other groups will maintain their current workflow. In doing this you'll be able to maintain the overall culture and morale of the various teams. Either way, let everyone know that the company has adopted some features of the cloud. In my experience people will be interested. Just make sure you provide tons of learning material and reasons for collaboration.

It's best to be open about what the cloud is and isn't with your teams. It's not a magic technology/collection of services that solves all issues. It's an extension of what your IT & engineering teams can do for your organization. It also empowers non-technical personnel to get more involved in tech. Engineers can build tools that can be launched with the touch of a bottom at scale.