7 Key Elements of a Cloud Strategy

I have been fortunate to be part of as well as lead multiple cloud transformations in my career. As part of the journey, one of the key things I would recommend is having a sound strategy before you go all in. Why? Well, I have seen folks ring up 100s of thousands of dollars in cloud cost for a small side project or start a resource with public permissions or have default passwords on resources. Or at a larger scale, not achieving the business outcomes that were promised as part of the cloud adoption. Yes. All of that happens. The good news is that all of that is preventable or at least something that can be mitigated.

Now, there are a lot of places you can find a cloud strategy. Each large public cloud platform has its own strategy/adoption framework. However, most of them are biased to that platform. There is also a cottage industry of consultants and vendors who could create this strategy for you. You can do that but I would recommend that you use all of that as input and create your own strategy that you own.

I will walk you through the key elements of a Cloud Strategy from my experience. I would also be sharing a template for creating your own strategy in the near future.

The following depicts the 7 key elements of a cloud strategy. I will walk you through each of them.

Let's look at each of these elements and what are the main aspects of the same.

If you listen to the hype, Cloud is going to solve world hunger. However, when you get down to the brass tacks, here are the typical business outcomes and benefits that can be achieved by adopting cloud technologies and platforms:

• Faster Speed to Market: This is the most obvious benefit. Cloud technologies typically provide automation that is embedded as part of the offering. That aspect along with others helps you create and launch solutions much faster than what you can do with on-prem solutions.
• Pay as you go: This is a feature of the cloud that can enable you to start small without large capital investment and then scale as you go.
• Leverage the innovation in public cloud space: The large public cloud providers (likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft) are investing billions of dollars into enhancing their cloud capabilities and bringing in new innovation. This is your opportunity to leverage those innovations to create competitive solutions.
• Cost Transparency: Cloud can provide cost transparency with details and allocation to individual resources and transactions. This can provide very clear details on where your money is going.
• Scale easily when needed: Elasticity is another common feature of cloud platforms. What this means is that you don't have to size your hardware for your worst-case scenario and spend all that capital upfront. You can size your environments for what you need and scale up and down resources (and cost) as per your business needs.
• Enable Innovation & Experimentation: Because of the low cost to start, innovative capabilities in the cloud, and speed of deployment, Cloud enables low cost, fast experimentation, and innovative solutions.
• More Secure: Don't get me wrong. The Security in the cloud is still your responsibility. However, the security of the cloud platform is the responsibility of the provider. Now common sense says that you cannot possibly match the Billions of Dollars and resources that the cloud provider spends on the physical security of their data centers or Security Operations.
• Enable geographic expansion: Imagine trying to enable capabilities across the world in different continents and countries on your own. Cloud gets you that almost out of the box.
• Cost savings: This is one of the things where there could be a gap between reality and marketing. Don't get me wrong, there are cost savings to be had. But there is quite a bit of planning to be done and you have to also consider aspects around Capex and Opex spend. That discussion is for another article.
• Eliminate technical debt: No more Windows 2003 Servers to worry about. In theory, the cloud provides you the ability to move beyond this kind of upgrades and patching to worry about. Yep, this makes you more secure.

Well, these are just the typical benefits. There could be more. Here is what you need to do:

• Identify the top 3 or top 5 benefits and outcomes for YOU. Define specific measures.
• Prioritize the benefits. The reason is that there are going to be trade-offs between these benefits. It's important to provide direction on how to decide among the trade-offs.

Let's move now to the next element.

There are 3 aspects of the application strategy that you will need:

• Where will you build your new business solutions and applications?
• How will you migrate (or not) your existing applications?
• How will you innovate and experiment on the cloud?

New Business Solutions and Applications: This is your typical build-buy-rent strategy. You need to update this for the Cloud. For each of these decisions, you now have a cloud aspect. Are you going to build using the Cloud PaaS, containers, or on-prem traditional? Are you going to buy and host on IaaS on the Cloud?

We typically considered the following factors for build, buy, rent decisions:

Now, for the cloud decision, we have to start considering the following factors to decide if we build/buy/rent on the cloud Vs on-prem:

Depending on one or more of the above, you could decide on placing the workload on the cloud or on-prem.

Migrating existing applications: Now there are few established frameworks to decide how you can migrate existing applications to the cloud. The most popular ones are 4R or 6R frameworks. You basically assess your applications on few dimensions and using the assessment results, determine the strategy. The following is the summary of the 6R framework:

Innovation & Experimentation: Cloud enables quick experimentation of ideas. You want to enable that but you also don't want 1000s of these experiments to linger and become business-critical apps. This is a balancing act. You don't want to stifle innovation in this process. What you typically want to do is following to enable this innovation and experimentation:

• Sandbox Environment: Have the ability for engineers to provision on-demand and experiment in sandbox environments that can be used to prove out an idea before scaling.
• Enable self-service for business users: whether it's data, AI or RPA. Enable self-service capabilities for your business users.
• Establish a lightweight process to scale innovations: Create lightweight governance and processes to scale innovations.

Well, there are quite a few cloud platforms that are out there. And you can start leveraging all of them. However, in any large or mid-size organization, it's not that easy. There are Cloud Service Agreements and contracts to be signed, governance has to be put in, etc., etc. And you have to enable your organization to be able to leverage that cloud. Thus it could become counterproductive if you just use your credit card to buy into these multiple cloud platforms.

Here is a potential approach in adopting a cloud platform for the Enterprise:

This is pretty important as I have seen the results of going into multiple platforms without these steps. Even if you don't do a heavyweight process for adopting a platform, think through each of the above steps and what (if any) due diligence should be done.

Lets now move to one of the important elements of the strategy

Cloud governance is something that you don't want but need :) Many aspects of the governance can slow down cloud adoption but it's a necessary evil because cloud adoption comes with a set of security, financial, compliance, and operational risk. You need to put in some governance to mitigate those aspects.

Here is a sample of capabilities for which you need to establish some kind of governance:

For each of the above categories, you need to determine things like "What's my subscription Structure?", "How do I tag resources", "What does my physical or virtual networking look like?", "How do I track and report cost?". Once you have selected a cloud provider, all the big 3 now provide you with guidance on how to go about this process:

• Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework
• AWS Cloud Adoption Framework
• Google's Cloud Adoption Framework

You need to create a detailed framework and sometimes define specific implementation details for each of the above capabilities.

Now that you have defined and implemented your governance structure you need to make sure that you have the following operationalized through people, processes and tools:

• Provisioning: How will you provision new environments? How do you ensure you have the process and tools defined for the same? etc.
• Access Management: How do you grant, audit and maintain access to different resources in the cloud? How do you ensure you are compliant with all policies and processes.
• Incident Monitoring & Response: How do you respond to incidents that are specific to applications, to the governance framework as well as at the platform level?
• Security operations: How do you monitor and respond to security threats and incidents?
• Ongoing Monitoring & Optimization: How do you monitor costs, security vulnerabilities, inefficiencies, etc., and optimize on an ongoing basis.

To be honest, this is the bare minimum. You have to apply all the aspects of IT Operations (as you would for your on-prem environment) now to your new cloud environments. And the good news is, if you do it right, this is easier and more robust than your on-prem environments because of the tools and capabilities provided by the cloud platforms.

So what has organization got to do with any of this? Well, it does. It depends on the context of your cloud adoption:

• If you are adopting cloud at a large scale, it's a huge priority, and your cloud footprint is going to expand significantly, then it makes sense to integrate cloud platform capabilities into your existing infrastructure and security organizations.
• If you are incubating the capability with few use cases and going to adopt cloud over a longer period, it makes sense to start with a small cloud platform team (with full autonomy over the cloud) that will later enable the rest of the organization.

One of the pitfalls is to do something in the middle. Stand up a cloud platform team but not with full autonomy. It will not end well.

The success of cloud will sometimes hinge on setting this up right since the cloud can be seen as threatening the status quo power centers in an IT org and is also a big mindset shift in how things are done on-prem.

Talent is a big ingredient of your strategy. This part of your strategy needs to consider the following:

• New Roles: Cloud introduces new roles like Cloud Engineer, Cloud Architect, Cloud Security Architect, Cloud Operations Engineer, etc. into the organization that might require a specialized skillset.
• Shifting of responsibilities and duties: The Cloud definitely shifts and changes the responsibilities and duties of existing roles due to automation and the new paradigm that it includes. In the cloud, one has to think more full-stack and has to be aware of the platform characteristics compared to the siloed role and skillsets that exist on-prem.
• Upskilling existing talent: Cloud does not just introduce new technologies, it's also a shift in mindset and how we design cloud-native applications or think of things like Disaster Recovery and High Availability. This requires upskilling application, infrastructure, and security engineers on cloud capabilities and "the art of possible" in the cloud.

Wow, this was fun to write. Hopefully, this was useful to you as you start or continue your journey on the cloud. Obviously, I skipped a lot of specifics from my experience but message me if you want to share war stories or compare scars of your journey.