A hyggelig #Cloud (part 4 of 4)

How to make sure your Cloud is balanced, healthy to your company bottom line and friendly to your staff

Cloud computing provides a huge opportunity to transform your company, offering considerable business agility, service improvements and cost efficiencies.

However, none of the above comes for free: you do need to craft a sound strategy and execute it well, keep costs under control and address the disruption killers. But most importantly, you need to invest into transforming people’s attitudes and ways of working.

Focusing solely on the technology without dedicating a significant amount of time and resources on transforming people's attitude, culture and skills, organisational change and process re-engineering can lead to negligible improvements.

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<DISCLAIMER>

In this post I will go through some of the ideas I’m most familiar with - it is really meant to be an introduction, call it a conversation starter.

In fact, it is not covering every problem and every solution out there: there are excellent deeper articles on the execution of cloud transformation. And a lot of experts around.

Enough disclaiming. Let's start.

</DISCLAIMER>

Last week we had a look at how agility is an important factor in the #cloud.

This week we will focus on keeping the negative forces away and we will draw some final recommendations.

Addressing the disruption killers

There are several factors threatening cloud adoption and change. These need to be considered thoroughly and appropriate actions need to be put in place well upfront in the process:

Politics

Good old company politics comes in many flavours. Sometimes there is disagreement within teams or individuals – some drive cloud adoption, whilst some others run the data centre. Some drive cloud native application deployment, whilst some others defensively resist application re-factoring.

A Cloud Centre of Excellence or a Cloud Advocate is needed to drive the agenda and resolve conflicts. These need blessing from above and from the organization overall: the journey to cloud adds business value and all anti-cloud myths should clear up early in the process.

Security concerns

While these days enterprises are migrating applications and data to the cloud with no hesitation, security remains a serious concern. Although as of today there’s been no serious breach in any of the hyperscalers, compared to the many security breaches of private companies, probably this false myth remains because effectively security teams lose overall control.

In fact, public cloud providers adopt a shared security model, where the provider has the responsibility of the security OF the cloud, and your security team takes the responsibility of the security IN the cloud.

However, this is a weak argument: again, it’s all about upskilling security teams and creating new policies, so conflicts can be kept at a minimum, and the speed of cloud adoption is not decreased.

Watch out when any time a large enterprise suffers a breach of any kind, the security fear reaches public cloud initiatives, even though that is exactly the point: it all started and developed outside of the cloud world.

Vendor favouritism

Distrust people in your organization that may favour historical vendors, even when they are not the optimal solution for a cloud environment. Alternatively, they may push a host of misleading statements about the leading cloud vendors in order to push forward their agenda for false clouds. Worst case, they may also promote false myths about public cloud to force leaders to continue to invest in data centre and home brew clouds.

Technical challenges. And a different team attitude.

Building solutions in the cloud can bring a number of technical challenges, especially when your staff lacks in-house skills and cloud native thinking when re-factoring into cloud native applications, but also when cloud applications need to integrate with on-premises solutions. Integrating with non-cloud technologies could create complexities which could lead to slow progress.

Old fashioned thinking leads to suboptimal architectures and solutions, resulting in the cloud becoming nothing more than another data centre, instead of an agile and innovative platform. It is imperative to update mindsets, tools and procedures to the new era.

Since cloud is all about agility, a new delivery model needs to be crafted: re-evaluate the entire software development lifecycle by empowering frequent deployments which rely on full stack automation. Manual interventions give way to automated security, standard blueprints, automated patching and proactive monitoring. This is such a radical change, yet essential and critical.

Deployment and automation of applications in the cloud is usually described today as DevOps. Public cloud providers offer their own DevOps tools, but for multi-cloud normally a single, overall DevOps capability is needed. Some DevOps tools help manage scripts to describe deployment and redeployment steps - the imperative model - while others define states that represent the correct operation and generate the necessary commands to maintain those states - the declarative approach.

There are many options with cloud automation tools. Chef is the most popular imperative tool today, and Puppet the most widely used declarative one.

The essence of DevOps is in establishing a culture and an environment in which building, testing, and releasing software can happen frequently, rapidly, and reliably. Its key enablers are collaboration, communication, and automation.

This culture and environment needs to span across the entire ‘IT supply chain’, which involves all the stakeholders responsible for business demand, development, quality assurance, and operations.

This is likely to require cultural transformation, to break silos and embed collaboration and communication in the DNA of a ‘DevOps-ready’ organisational structure and processes.

Many organisations have lofty implementation plans for their cloud transformation programme and other strategic initiatives that require embracing agile. But without adopting DevOps their ‘delivery engine’ becomes a severe bottleneck and the main obstacle to success.

To ensure DevOps is aligned with business need, your IT needs to work with stakeholders to identify where it could provide the biggest benefits – and use that as the direction of travel for all related decisions.

Instead of embarking on a large DevOps transformation programme and risk “boiling the ocean”, it is important to start small, then capitalise on the success and the lessons learned to expand.

How to best reorganise people and processes to support DevOps will vary for each organisation, and there is not a single answer.

Poor execution

Regardless of the previous attention points, you still have to manage and execute this complex and transformational initiative effectively. The key here is to not take on too much too soon. The minimal viable cloud approach is the preferred one: a small set of workloads which allow an enterprise to iterate through building in the necessary security, controls and operations thus allowing to quickly deploy services to the cloud, without having to spend months or years trying to realize the perfect cloud. Successful cloud implementations require a true agile approach, with a fail fast culture. And the organization should allow for mistakes to happen. After all, that’s how people will learn and improve. Teams should in fact iterate through mistakes and small sprints and learn and adjust along the way.

Unrealistic Expectations

Many enterprises start their cloud journey with unrealistic expectations. Performing a huge evaluation which spans multiple clouds, including private, with cloud management platforms and other advanced technologies before even having a clue on how to build a single application on the cloud is not the best way to start.

Start lean and simple, adjust from experience and re-iterate expectations and execution plans to achieve them.

Final recommendation

Too often, companies try to build the perfect cloud and spend months to years wasting tons of money and effort with little or nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, they are still paying for all the infrastructure in the data centre and people keep investing their time and effort in the old stuff.

Plan to the best of your knowledge, by applying the idea of a Minimal Viable Cloud. Apply cost optimisation techniques. Create a Cloud Centre of excellence to master strategy, govern execution, foster the cloud culture, empower the cloud economist role and keep the disruptors under control.

Adopt agile and DevOps.

Learn from it all, improve cloud skills, change mentality accordingly. Involve everybody in the company, make them accountable and enthusiastic about the cloud being instrumental to positive change.

Seed, evangelize, explain.

Create an all-encompassing dynamic cloud strategy and execute. Once you are done with an iteration, try it out and check results. Then re-iterate the whole cycle again.

Your path to the best use of cloud is only as good as your ability to execute on your cloud strategy. And your people and the company culture are of paramount importance.

Cloud transformation is more about “transformation”, rather than “cloud”.

It is mainly a people factor, not a technology factor.

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I really hope the above and the previous articles sparkled some new conversations and ideas within your team and company.

To read the whole article, please start again or go to my Medium.