Cloud Transformation

The journey to the cloud for Live Nation kicked off in 2015 with a mandate to get out of the data center business. Focusing on the growth of the business the company made the strategic decision to migrate to the cloud. Live Nation partnered with AWS to migrate its systems to the cloud and shut down related servers and storage in the data center.

I've had the opportunity to share our Cloud story with hundreds of CIOs at Evanta CIO Executive Summits in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, and Phoenix, and in CIO breakout sessions at Harvard Business School and MIT in Boston, and at the Harvard Club of New York City. The feedback and appreciation for Live Nation's progress from those undertaking the same journey has been terrific.

What follows are a few highlights and video clips from my Cloud Computing keynotes at CIO Executive Summits.

Transformation...

A process of profound and radical change that orients an organization in a new direction and takes it to an entirely different level of effectiveness. 

Objectives, Scope and ROI

Get out of the data center business and focus on projects that align strategically with company goals.

Reduce capital expenditures. No more servers, switches, routers, storage, racks, loadbalancers, cables, firewalls, power supplies, and generators.

Reduce operating expense. Eliminate power, hardware maintenance and support, air conditioning, building leases, and data center operating costs.

Systems In Scope:

• Finance & Accounting
• Analytics & Reporting
• Active Directory
• File Servers
• Email & Intranet
• Databases & Data Warehouses
• Security, Compliance, Anti-virus & VMs

Migration Scope and Results:

• 118 applications 
• 668 servers
• Timeline - 15 months

Here's a clip from that covers our Objectives. See additional clips below covering Health Check, Results, and Lessons Learned.

Strategic Health Check

How do you ensure best practices when moving an enterprise from traditional data center to the cloud?

A well-architected design and effectively executed project plan is a good start, but one of the keys to success is to perform independent strategic health checks at critical points along the way.

Below are the 7 areas of focus in our system-by-system Strategic Health Check:

1. Best Practices
2. Architecture
3. High Availability
4. Security
5. Compliance
6. Scalability
7. Cost

In addition to the 7 areas of focus, we defined the Seven Rs to help address key differences between running legacy applications in the cloud versus a traditional data center.

The Seven Rs:

• Reliability
• Redundancy
• Resiliency
• Reusability
• Repeatability
• Recoverability
• Responsibility

The following clip details performing strategic cloud transformation health checks to ensure best practices when moving to the cloud from my Cloud Computing keynote at CIO Executive Summit.

Results & Key Benefits

What are the key benefits in moving from traditional data center to the cloud?

• Agility
• Flexibility
• Scalability
• Performance
• Transparency

Wait, where's cost? Isn't that a key benefit? See clip below to find out.

Key Lessons Learned

What are the key lessons learned and takeaways in successfully moving from traditional data center to the cloud?

Here's my top 10 list:

1. Management support is a critical success factor
2. Architect for high availability and fault tolerance
3. Include costs of redundancy in budget
4. Move non-production systems first
5. Use SaaS and DBaaS where it makes sense
6. Size H/A environments to MVP to reduce costs
7. Availability Zone (AZ) failover for high availability
8. Use region failover for disaster recovery
9. Use load balancing to manage H/A and DR failovers
10. Consolidate databases to single instances/clusters

The following clip covers these and other key lessons learned.

A huge thank you to the Live Nation IT team for the amazing job they did on this project.

Thank you, Evanta, for shooting the keynote videos. Videos (c) 2018 Evanta Ventures LLC

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