What Organizations Are Getting Wrong With the Cloud

The worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 18% in 2017 to total $246.8 billion, up from $209.2 billion in 2016, according to Gartner, Inc.

Why is everyone moving to the cloud? What's with all of the hype??

Two words - digital transformation.

It's not a question of 'if', but rather 'when' - when will your industry be disrupted? And how prepared is your organization for when that day comes?

There's a really good episode of CXO Talk that touches on this concept:

Here's a good quote from the podcast:

"So now the CEOs say I've got a great CIO, he can keep the trains running on time. He’s very good, but what I'm worried about is if am I going to get uberized. Is somebody going to do something and completely change my business model? So you ask should I hire a digital guy, should I hire somebody else? So there's a lot of talk about this and what that means is the CIO has not transitioned. I mean you've got to keep on changing; every year the stakes go up." - Bask Iyer, CIO of VMware

You see, nobody wants their business to get disrupted - nobody wants to get 'uberized'. But what do you do to avoid it? You must move forward with digital transformation.

What does that mean for a mid-market or enterprise CIO? Well, it depends on your business and what industry you're in. Here's some ideas:

• Use digital to enhance your customer experience (or student experience in education)
• Improve e-commerce site
• Make everything you do more mobile-friendly
• Artificial Intelligence
• Internet of Things
• Develop innovative software that gives business a competitive advantage
• Adopt modern methodologies (DevOps, Agile) to develop that software better and faster
• Social media strategy

So now the CEO is no longer looking at his IT department to simply keep systems running - he needs them to innovate.

"80% of CEOs believe IT innovation will lead to competitive advantage." -PwC

Here's the challenge for the CIO - how do you align your IT organization with all of these strategic business initiatives - while still keeping the lights on? Especially since IT is being told do reduce costs - to do more with less.

That's exactly why there's this huge shift to cloud. Your organization can embrace digital transformation, without spending a fortune on IT. The data center is a money pit - it doesn't do anything to grow your business. Spend more of your time, $ and resources on innovation - less on the data center. That's what the cloud is for!

"Companies using the cloud grow 19.3% faster than their competitors."              -Vanson Bourne

 However, here's what organizations moving to the cloud are getting wrong...

They're doing it alone.

So many organizations think they can just spin up some VMs on AWS or Azure and manage them. No problem, right? Wrong.

It's not that simple. The cloud is much more complex than that. This is your company's data we're talking about here - and often times it's your customer's data as well.

Plus, a recent RightScale, Inc. study shows that 85% of enterprises have a multicloud strategy, up from 82% in 2016. All of this brings up so many complex questions for the CIO:

• Where do I start?
• How do I manage multiple clouds?
• How do I prioritize the workloads?
• It's hard enough to get my staff trained and certified on one cloud - how can I possibly do two?
• How do I know I'm not overpaying?
• What's my total cost of ownership compared to on-premise?
• How do I ensure that I'm meeting security and compliance regulations?
• Ho do I provision and manage my VMs in the cloud? 
• Which applications should I move to my IaaS provider, and which should I switch to SaaS?
• Is a public cloud, private cloud or hybrid cloud right for my business?
• What's my DR strategy?

So many complex questions! And with the stakes being higher than ever, this exactly why you cannot do this alone.

Keeping everything internal, within the four walls of your business - that's the old way of doing IT. Keeping vendors at an arm's length - that's the old way of doing IT. In 2017, IT organizations should not have vendors - they should have partners.

No organization should have a 'cloud-first strategy.' It should be a 'business-first strategy', with the cloud being used as a strategic vehicle to achieve desired business outcomes.

So as CIO, where do you go for help in order to make this happen? Well, you could hire an outside consulting firm that specializes in cloud and digital transformation. However, while they might do a great job at helping you build out a road map, they won't be able to actually execute it - that will be all on you.

You could go to one of the big public cloud providers like Azure, which spends over $1 billion per year on security.

However, most organizations don't realize:

• How complex Azure and AWS really are to deploy and manage
• How little support you get from them

Azure and AWS are self-managed clouds. What you get from them is server space in their cloud - not support. This means the burden will lie square on the shoulders of your internal team to deploy and manage the workloads, to do the monitoring, the load balancers, the updates, the patches, etc.

This is all very complex stuff! And it will only get more complex as you move more workloads to the cloud - or deploy multiple clouds. Most IT organizations aren't equipped to handle this. This is what can happen if you try to go it alone:

• The project fails, you end up scrapping the whole thing after 6 months and going back to on-premise - wasting all of that time and $
• The project succeeds, but deployment took way too long and as CIO you realize that your team is spending far too much time managing workloads on Azure and not enough on more strategic IoT and mobility projects

Don't go it alone.

The answer to this problem? A Cloud Managed Services Provider. Have the best of both worlds. Reap all of the benefits of the cloud - without any of the headache.

It makes perfect sense! Then why don't more organizations do it?

It's because there's so much noise out there about cloud. IT leaders are getting hit from all angles - at trade shows, from content on the web, sales calls / e-mails, etc. There's literally thousands of different providers out there - they're overwhelmed with too many choices. But they hear about Azure and AWS the most, so they just end up going with them - not realizing that their are providers out there who can fill those gaps where Azure and AWS are lacking in support.

CIOs, be careful - not all Cloud MSPs are created equal. Many of them do managed cloud services, but they're really not custom config solutions. Instead they're offering pre-packaged cookie-cutter solutions. They have boxes, and they try to fit all of their customers into one of those boxes.

Navisite doesn't do that. One of our SAs spent eight weeks working on a custom config DR solution for a customer - and they only had 40 VMs! We wanted to take our time to make sure the solution was just right for their needs - as opposed to hurry up and fit them in a box.

I'll end this post by articulating what makes Navisite different:

• Custom config solutions that meet the unique needs, applications and workloads of our customers - all tailored around our customer's desired business outcomes. How do we do that? Our secret weapon - the best team of Cloud Solutions Architects on the planet.
•  Navisite has been delivering cloud services to the enterprise for 20 years and has successfully done 2,000+ data migrations. Who else can say that?
• Proximity, our enhanced client portal which provides full transparency and a single pane of glass, custom tailored the way they want it. The customer has access 24/7/365 on any device, in any location. What the customer sees is what we see, as we help to co-manage the environment - so you never have to worry about losing control. 
• Partnerships with VMware, Microsoft, Oracle - and a team of certified engineers for each. Many cloud providers specialize in one or two - we have experience and expertise in all three.
• Navisite is part of Spectrum Enterprise, a Fortune 100 company. Together customers can have one solution - for network, fiber, voice, data and cloud.
• A managed support services package for Office 365 that is THE gold standard. Comprehensive SLAs, 24/7 monitoring and Proofpoint security.

Conclusion

• Don't get uberized!
• Leverage the cloud in order to enable digital transformation and competitive advantage
• When it comes to cloud - don't go it alone!
• Find a strategic partner - not a vendor
• Choose a Cloud Managed Services Provider with the necessary experience and expertise - one that designs custom config solutions - cloud is not one-size-fits-all!

<-- Thanks for reading! Questions and comments are welcome -->

Jeremy Leveille is a Channel Sales Manager for NaviSite, a Cloud Managed Services Provider. Jeremy is a Cloud Computing Advocate, CIO's Best Friend and Enabler of Digital Transformation. He can be found on LinkedIn or on Twitter @leveillejeremy. The views expressed in this blog post are Jeremy's and do not reflect those of his employer.