Cloud Adoption: this is where everything changes.
Javier Colladon
"Director of Cloud Engineering | Expert in Multicloud, Hybrid Strategies & AI Integration | Public Speaker on Cloud Innovation & Business Transformation | Passionate About Scalable Solutions & Industry Best Practices"
Article originally posted in https://community.open-telekom-cloud.com/community?id=community_blog&sys_id=2bc3e7761339d4d0d15a246ea67441e2
Today, let’s talk about cloud adoption.
Every enterprise talks about Digital Transformation to accelerate business innovations and time to Market. Cloud technology is the critical tool to implement a successful Digital Transformation, and to “Reach the Clouds “ you need a proper plan, a strategy, and a clear view of where, when, how and why you should transition your workload to the cloud.
Suppose you already have some first-hand experience with the Public Cloud. In that case, this won’t (shouldn’t) be a problem, but if you are about to start or thinking of starting your journey to the cloud, you may be asking yourself many questions like, “What does the cloud mean for my organisation? “, “How would I get started? “What should I change, and in what order? “What are the challenges ahead? “Who should I involve? “How would I present this to my stakeholders? “This document may have some answers.
According to RightScale’s 2019 State of the Cloud Survey, 94% of the respondents have adopted the cloud technology, and, based on our experience, they have adopted cloud technologies in pursuit of a broader business driver and transformation program driven by cultural, financial or innovation-related goals, but under the desire (or necessity) to be more competitive and to have more modern, digital capabilities in their organisations.
One of the first things we must understand is that “Digital Transformation is not a finite process “.
The idea of digital transformation with a beginning, middle, and end must be corrected. The fundamental goal of a well-implemented transformation is not a finite goal but a continuous process that will enable your company to deploy technology quickly to meet business needs, no matter where that technology comes from.
Every company is a complex ecosystem, and every journey to the cloud differs. Still, there are some patterns and common ground that can be identified.
Those patterns are comprised in a model called Stages of Adoption, first introduced by former Down Jones CIO Stephen Orban when leading the stock market index company digital transformation, and each of these stages, Project, Foundation, Migration, Reinvention) represents what happens in your organisation during its never-ending journey to become a digital company. Keep in mind that, while in this document, they are presented as a linear process, you may have many business units running simultaneously across different stages; remember, this is not a finite process but a continuous experience that will never end if you fully embrace it.
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STAGE 1: PROJECT
What project should I start with?
Most organisations start with a few projects while learning and experimenting with the cloud, so which project should I pick for a start? We suggest picking something important enough for the actors involved to care about it but not highly critical, which can have severe consequences if it fails.
Allowing your teams to do something meaningful while facing the new challenges of moving into the cloud is essential.
Pick always for starting, if possible, something on the low-complexity end of the project spectrum that can deliver value to the business.
It sounds like you will have to be very selective, a little bit of this, but not too much of that, and you are right; the key is starting with something you can handle. It is not so easy that nobody will learn anything, but it is not so critical that it can get you fired if something goes wrong. Your early cloud projects must be the kickstarting point for something bigger and more significant, and these days, you can afford to make mistakes, learn, rethink, and start again if needed.
Who should work on these projects?
This question is more natural to answer than you may think. Please start with the people who are excited about the idea and turn them into your cloud ambassadors.
It’s all in the attitude, of course. Aptitude also matters, but the mood will give you half the battle before it starts. Keep an eye on the people who aren’t afraid of changes and are willing to experiment; those early ambassadors will, in time, be candidates to conform to your Cloud Excellence Centre.
What about the ones that are uncomfortable with the digital transformation? Be empathetic, provide them with the tools they need, and educate them, but in the end, if you are serious about the change, those who can’t or won’t adapt and learn should be moved away from the cloud projects before they can drag down the whole endeavour.
Who should drive the early projects?
It would be a mistake not to have a centralised delivery process. We barely touched before the Cloud Centre of Excellence Team and will discuss it later. The right approach would be having the Cloud Centre of Excellence Team provide IT-approved cloud reference architectures to business units so that they can safely innovate on top of them securely, governed and transparently.
This approach has many advantages; we can have the liberation of innovation within different BU while still affording the Central IT department the tools needed to enforce security, compliance, and consistency across large IT footprints.
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STAGE 2: FOUNDATIONS
Here, we will discuss a couple of foundational investments your organisation must make to succeed in the digital transformation.
This will include creating a cross-functional team dedicated to the transformation efforts, the Cloud Centre of Excellence Team, ?and the proper governance and operating model for leveraging the cloud at scale.?
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The Cloud Centre of Excellence Team.
Like all centres of excellence, CCOE brings together a diverse, knowledgeable group of experts from across the organisation to develop best practices that the rest of the organisation will later follow. it
With a Cloud Centre of Excellence Team, ?your IT department can set up repeatable, federated policies, frameworks, procedures and reference architectures for the organisation to follow as you migrate applications and infrastructure to the cloud. It will save you time and effort while ensuring security and compliance.
Build Reference Architectures that you can reuse.
It’s instrumental that your teams can identify the common patterns in the applications they own.
If they find a reference architecture that meets the needs of several applications, the next step is to create the scripts to automate its deployment.
Cloud adoption is a long journey that will get the most out of your investments, and along that journey, you will need to keep your systems running while deploying and migrating. Automation and reusability are the keys to success, and this will be easier if your CCOE team has the proper visibility across your IT portfolio. They are the right people to look for and identify patterns and translate them into cloud reference architectures.?
Culture of experimentation and learning.
The cloud is an experimentation enabler, and your CCOE is the indication to define an appropriate operating model and bake it into the reference architectures and continuous integration pipeline that will allow us to abolish the big release windows in favour of small changes whenever you have them ready.
Finally, remember, “Education is the most effective mechanism.” Stick to this fact because it’s one of the most critical topics for organisations to remain competitive.
?To summarise, these foundational investments will benefit your organisation in the many years to come. Remember that you can iterate on and improve your foundation over time. It should be solid but flexible, like water, strong enough to carve a mountain path but flexible enough to fit anywhere.
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STAGE 3: MIGRATION
Before starting to talk about this stage in more detail, we need to define what a “Cloud Migration” is, and we will use Stephen Orban’s definition for it, “Mass Migration or Cloud Migration, is the movement of a meaningful portion of your organisation’s existing IT assets to the cloud.” It might involve a data centre or a collection of them. It could comprise an entire BU or a single application and use different transport mediums, like the public internet, a private/dedicated network or physical transfer.
As there are multiple ways to measure and perform a migration, there are different approaches to migrating into the cloud; we will recommend the one composed of two models, “The five steps migration process” and the Application Migration strategy, also called the 6 R’s.
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The 5 Steps Migration Process
As we said above, each migration is a unique and particular ecosystem with its peculiarities; this model helps understand and implement the migration and allows for the codifying best practices and tools needed to migrate.
You will find a more in-depth review of this process in the “The journey to the cloud: migration steps and strategies” whitepaper.
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The Application Migration Strategy (The 6 R’s)
It does not a single unified way to migrate applications to the cloud, and you may find that there are many shades of grey in between; however, in 2011, Gartner identified five common migration strategies: Rehost, Refactor, Revise, Rebuild and Replace; on top of these is that the 6 R’s model was built and consist in the following:
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STAGE 4: REINVENTION
As we said at the beginning of this document, the Cloud Journey is a never-ending process of learning, experimentation, and adaptation.
Automation, CD/CI, and constant optimisation are instrumental for a successful cloud experience.
The Market and the technologies are evolving fast and continuously, and your organisation needs to keep pace. The cloud today doesn’t have a single reminiscence of what was in the mid-2000s or the early 2010s, and the cloud will probably not be near to what it is today in two or three years. In the past, would have been ok to be reactive and improve only when we detected a gap, or a weakness in our model, today, it’s imperative to have a plan and act accordingly, a continuous method, an infinite never-ending journey, like walking on a M?bius strip.
If your organisation is serious about investing in cloud-first strategies as you continuously evolve your business, you must embrace the fourth and never-ending stage of adoption: “Reinvention.”
This will be all for today, thanks for reading and hope this can be useful for your organisations.