Moving to a Public Cloud:Adopting the Right Cloud Mindset is Important
It was an amazing breakthrough back in 2006 when Amazon Web Services’ experiment became official, giving developers a platform to launch their software products more quickly and independently. Programmers and developers no longer stood in queue waiting for infrastructure teams to create an environment compatible with their host application; they could now provision that same infrastructure themselves and far faster.
History of design
The design of AWS included the removal of capital, infrastructure and process barriers that any typical business would face in bringing their own product to market. By making these a non-issue for companies, it made launching new products rapidly and with much less effort, it isn’t any wonder that the public cloud market is expected to hit $191 billion USD by 2020.
Shifting of technical debt
For a company looking to migrate to the cloud today, migrating their legacy systems to a cloud option carries with it the added benefit of eliminating the technical debt from older processes and policies. It is important however, to be mindful to avoid creating a new technical debt during the development and deployment of the new cloud system. During the course of adopting a cloud-first mindset, while it may seem like an expected outcome of digital transformation, it does require significant changes to any company’s culture and behavior.
Maturing capability and requirements
The first thought companies held when “cloud” was introduced into the lexicon of modern business, was that it was strictly a cost-cutting measure. From the onset, organizations main goals were to eliminate expenses and embrace the major cost savings they assumed were waiting for them; despite not fully understanding the platform or its potential.
As a result, many implementations were generally short-sighted, lacked a well-defined strategy and focused only on immediate savings and not on long term goals.
As public clouds adoption increased, it was obvious that in order for long term success to be achieved, there was an immediate need to redefine digital strategy.
A public cloud-first approach must reshape the way a business thinks about the technology used how best to avoid recreating the same technical debt as prior to moving to the cloud. Comprehensive governance and compliance policies, monitoring shadow IT, cloud sprawl, identifying uncontrolled (or unmonitored) spend are just a few areas to address with the migration.
The human element
The transformation of your technology must extend beyond the digital component to include the human component. Think of this as a long-term endeavor in modernizing and empowering you people, while fostering collaboration amongst the teams. Any transformation will have limited impact if the business does not consider how the teams, think, interact and behave.
This interaction is vital due to the significant number of operational changes introduced that can present challenges to employees who are more comfortable maintaining the status quo. Your plan to disrupt your industry only comes after disrupting the status quo within the organization.
Introducing new tools and technologies, both new or even if they are just updated versions to existing ones in use will always require a level of up skilling. It is critical and a necessary step to help your teams bridge this technical gap.
Understanding the purpose
Adopting digital transformation simply for the sake of adoption will always fail in the end. Your company must objectively assess goals, consider all options (yes even the traditional hosted one) and prioritize agile and flexible solutions at minimum. From here, you will be able to redefine the approach to problem-solving and decision-making. This mindset re-focuses the cloud from an ‘out-there alternative’ option to one that is the most logical choice to make.
Final Thoughts
Rethinking the old way of doing things is very much the goal in digital transformation. Local hardware-based options can still be met but only if it is mandated where there is no other option. The process of cultural mindset change means that for all other systems, the best option may be the one where a cloud solution would function much better. Embracing change and accepting new technology brings the teams one step closer to understanding their purpose and the impact they will have in the new cloud adopted business.