GETTING TO THE DIGITAL HOW

My FOREWORD to "Getting to the digital how: The power of public cloud platforms" by Enguerran Astre

You can find the book on Amazon & various other online/offline sources

The best way to predict the future is to create it. Therefore, if you are a business operating in 2018, the best way to predict a prosperous future is to create it based on Cloud principles and with Cloud-first business models, organizations, and processes.

A new technological paradigm

Technology transformation is about reimagining how you bring together people, data, and processes to create value for your customers maintaining a competitive advantage in a digital-first world. The cloud is today the foundational enabler of this transformation, creating an ecosystem able to revolutionize how you operate and compete, bringing limitless potential to empower your employees and boost customers engagement.

As head of consulting and services at Microosft Italy, I witness every day that Cloud is profoundly changing how companies consume technology and how business can be run, drastically reducing time to-market. Many new opportunities are created, providing significant cost savings over traditional IT approaches and with the ability to quickly build robust, resilient applications that scale up as traffic spikes and down as it recedes. In addition, cloud enables disruptive innovation, key to create competitive differentiation and advantage.

You are probably using cloud computing already now, even if you don’t realize it. If you use any online service to send email, edit documents, watch movies or TV, listen to music, play games, or store pictures and other files, it’s likely that cloud computing is making it all possible behind the scenes. The first cloud computing services are barely a decade old, but already a variety of organizations (from tiny startups to global corporations, government agencies to non-profits) are embracing this amazing technology paradigm for all sorts of reasons.

The Cloud is not a technological revolution but an operating model and a business revolution. Cloud computing services (servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, intelligence and more) over the Internet  are fundamental for the digital transformation. Nevertheless, Cloud computing is especially (and more challenging) a big shift from the traditional way businesses think and operate IT resources.   To embrace this new cloud world, enterprises need a proven and consistent methodology for adoption of cloud technologies, which requires careful planning and strategy. One of the keys to cloud success is determining the optimal platform and priorities for running business applications. Each organization has different goals and timelines, making a one-size-fits-all approach to adoption nearly impossible.

Cloud transformation

Specifically, for a successful cloud transformation, it’s important to have a strong plan in place that covers the end-cloud environment, training, and, most importantly, the readiness of your workloads and applications. To do this, you need to determine how to successfully create business justification and initial technical plans. The goal is to ensure that your workloads will run as expected and perform the migration with limited impact to your business.

DevOps has a key role in this transformation, bringing together people, processes, and technology, and automating software delivery to provide continuous value to your users. With DevOps, organizations can deliver faster and more reliably, no matter how big their IT department or what tools they are using. As a matter of facts, with DevOps you can enable cloud automation and adaptation to your needs, taking advantage of continuous integration to improve technology development quality and speed. We are also in a strong open source aspiration. We used to see open source as a group of illuminated geeks! We are now coming in an industrial age. In 2017, 4,550 people from Microsoft and 2,267 from Google actively contributed to open source projects on GitHub. The reason is simple. Sharing code is the translation of a shift to a new opened economy. Value creation is no more linked to a mass production mode as car manufacturing.

Platform economy is now a reality. What does it mean? The application of big data & new algorithms, network and cloud computing change the nature of work and the structure of the economy. Vertical ladders are becoming horizontal collaborative grids. Upfront capital expenditures are turning into iterative operational expenditures. Society stability in a local ecosystem (American way of life model of the 50’s) is changing into a happy few nomadism in a worldwide ecosystem. This digital platform economy is emerging with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Uber, AirBnB and so on. They are creating online structures that enable a wide range of human activities.

All the transformations described above represent an exciting opportunity, but they can also be highly complicated for customers who are used to operating in a traditional (non-cloud) way. The purpose of this book is therefore grounded in our everyday discussions with customers. This book offers lots of practical recommendations on this cloud digital journey, including its human, organizational, and operational implications. It provides an uncompromising view of current opportunities, risks, and best practices.

A return of experience with Microsoft clients

At Microsoft, Enguerran and I have the privilege to work with the most advanced cloud strategy and escort beginner to the cloud. Clients experience offers us a 360° view and allows us to see clearly that three main plans are fundamental to go to the cloud. First, adoption plan is key to drive cloud adoption within your organization. It starts with basic explanations of what is happening to preliminary workshop to set-up right basis. Second, migration plan is a must have as organizations have usually a technical debt to recover. Third, operations plan is key and sometimes and can be underestimated. Cloud seems a magical world where everything is easy, but the reality is that people have to operate it every day. Fourth, platform plan is the business pillar of everything. If one goes to the cloud, this is just to make a more profitable business on a long-term basis. New business models are to be shaped with employees, partners, shareholders, trade unions or customers.

As each organization requires a varied approach to adopting the cloud and is at a different stage of cloud adoption, this book approaches cloud adoption from the perspective of organizational readiness. Enguerran has a vast experience in this field and he is surely among the best source you may find to accelerate your learning curve, building on the successes and learnings of all those who worked with us.

The “why cloud” is behind us. We must now tackle the “how cloud”