Cloud: a view from the cockpit

Most Fortune 500 companies are busy rolling out aggressive agendas of cloud migrations. Between them, there are many nuances and specifics - each path a little different than the next. But across them, a few learnings are consistent and common directions clearly stand out. 

Cloud-smart, not Cloud-first. We know now that the data center was never the spot to build durable competitive advantage for the average corporation, and the performance, elasticity, management and the consumption economics of the cloud drove the start of the cloud-first journey. Indeed, as I speak with many of my peers, it's easy to see those that were further along on the cloud journey found the switch to remote working a non-event at the start of the pandemic.

But the game has evolved from cost optimization to tech simplification and application modernization. The pandemic that has driven tremendous focus and attention on resilience and new offerings, stronger capabilities and better experience. All this now requires a better backplane - upon which to modernize the application stack, build new capability at speed, and draw upon the collective innovation in the ecosystem to achieve leverage. And that better backplane - is now the cloud, along with the composable services that run on it.

The best results invariably come from a cloud-smart approach. An approach that starts with the underlying business processes, and redesigning that value chain and the operating model around it to be in line with what's needed in the new normal. And then converting that business roadmap into a cloud journey that ultimately bridges capability gaps, modernizes the application stack, delivers the right experience, and lays the tech foundation for responding with agility and speed. This approach is less about lifting and shifting anything, and more about redesigning with the cloud.

Data is a first-class citizen. Traditionally, one of the most undervalued assets in a corporation - data has now become a first class citizen of enterprise architectures, and in many cases, has a seat on the board. It's easy to see how the ability to stream from anywhere on demand is a necessary condition to participate in the online entertainment space - but what's actually required to win is the feature extraction and data labels that allow the classification engines to serve up recommendations and drive stickiness and consumption. In industries from the traditional to the new, many companies have come to realize - their business is fundamentally about the data.

Clearly some of this new-found data-fluency is based on the realization of its intrinsic value, but its the elastic compute that comes with the cloud that has catalyzed the value it can deliver. It's no surprise then that so many of the cloud journeys are strategically data journeys.

But migrating data to the cloud is not about just moving it - it requires thoughtful consideration across privacy and residency, access and consumption patterns, and unfortunately in the real world - spaghettis of undocumented integration codes. In the end, it's about building with a consumption-centric mindset, not an ingestion-centric approach - which make the domain and the business processes critical in design and deployment.

A new Operating Model. One of the key learnings across cloud journeys has been that this is not enhancement to the old - it is really about a new operating model. It requires proactive design and careful guardrails.

Many an IT department have seen that the configurability in the cloud - such a large opportunity - quickly becomes a real challenge with configured-up-and-spun-away costs. Some on-premise applications, when moved to the cloud, can actually become more expensive to run and maintain. With distributed computing, scalable storage, and a consumption-based economic model, come the attendant challenges of security, privacy, residency and inter-company allocations - all of which require a completely new approach and toolkit for the IT department.

Sustainable success in cloud journeys therefore comes not just from the innovativeness of the approach, or the speed of conversion - but actually from change management, a platform engineering mindset and a rigorous governance model.

In the end, more and more companies will become technology companies, and more and more businesses - data businesses. In that journey its the cloud that will be the transformation catalyst and new operating models the bridge to get there.