Is your Cloud journey a holiday or a staycation?

What stage is your Cloud journey on? Are you on a day trip, annual holiday, staycation, or a relocation.

On a day trip, it can take a little bit of planning and organisation; equally, you could have no plan, and you leave your home and turn right, but, at the end of the day, if you are not having fun just come home. The worse at stake is one day and a lesson not to try it again the same way. Hopefully, the day trip does not put you off from taking other day trips and improving your short excursions. A day trip in Cloud is your prototype or science project with no expectations of making it enterprise-grade or scaling beyond the experiment. its should be fun, short and filled with potential.

Your annual holiday takes more investment of time, money, planning, and a higher risk and rewards . The reward is a great holiday full of enjoyment. Any poor planning can risk the happiness of the holiday and leave a poor memory of the places and cultures. However, if it goes wrong, then you see it out and don’t repeat the exercise for another year and vow to plan better for the following year. In the cloud space, these are your sample projects that are more than experiments and move applications into production. It demonstrates a good level of commitment to use the cloud for production workload but not the same commitment level that it takes to make cloud your primary platform. The lessons you learn either feed your next holiday or your relocation.

We have all been part of those cloud projects that are either day trips or annual holidays. While the project is heading to the cloud, you know that the organisation is doing this as a one-off or a tick box exercise to demonstrate they made an effort.?

In financial services, cloud projects are like the mandatory 10-day holiday that staff are required to take. Each bank has cloud projects that have been executed over the last few years to satisfy the “me too” rights. In some cases, the companies have moved from it being a holiday to it being a relocation. In other cases, they have kept it as a one-off holiday and focused on the staycations in the private cloud. This is not a negative judgement, just the situation of our collective cloud journeys.

A permanent move is a whole different approach. The preparation required over and above a holiday is not comparable; having to acclimatize & adapt to the environment instead of just being in it temporarily like a holiday is vastly different. The ability to come back after committing to the move can be expensive on your emotional state and security. The memory of the failed attempt hampers the ability to try again. In some cases whole teams have been moved on to refresh the approach.

When your Cloud strategy becomes a relocation and not just a holiday, it takes on a whole different feel and focus. You are committing to moving from a place of comfort that you have been in for 30+ years to a new zone with new capabilities and endless possibilities for new business models. The expecations are high and the effort is huge here is just a few ftips/steps to take on board when relocating to the cloud;

1 – Take a few holidays to the location. Checking out the area and opportunities by taking several holidays and day trips. On the Cloud journeys, take a few candidate migrations to the environment in a cloud-native setup to gain some framing of the effort. (Lift and Shift doesn’t count)

2 - Take an inventory of what you want to take with you. Understand the items you will leave behind and items that need to retired before you depart. In the Cloud journey, this means spending time reviewing your business workloads/applications for relocation. Not all your business applications and workloads will make no sense to move, some will show up as requiring to be retired, and others will be a natural fit for the change. Having this upfront work, whilst time-consuming, is valuable to ensure you don’t try to move stuff that doesn’t fit for your future or is costly or inappropriate to run in the Cloud.

3 – Secure a place to land initially that provides security, safety, and comfort. Having a landing zone with the features you need to start your new life in a new location is an essential investment up front. This may not be your final location, but it allows you to have an initial place to place yourself. Not having this defined upfront may mean that it is unsettling for people to move towards as no boundaries or safety is provided. If you don’t provide a landing zone, you are letting people pioneer and work it out for themselves, some will get it right and be successful, but others will get lost and return to the old places with scare stories to tell others. The initial landing zone will need to evolve as you become more accustomed to your new location and so don’t be scared if you need to make changes down the road. However, initially give everyone a good experience when they first land in the new world. This takes some commitment from your organisation. Don’t fall for the situation that the place you went on holiday in will make a good place for your relocation, that is a dangerous assumption. Take the time to design the right landing zone and experience to support relocations and not holidays.?keep improving the landing zone as you learn your new location.

4 – Upfront education for everyone relocating. When going on holiday, you read holiday guides that show you how to enjoy and experience the new place for a brief time. In the majority, you don’t tend to need to learn the language, cultural queues, and the long-term logistics items when you are there for a short period. When relocating, you need to invest in learning all items of being in a location, from language to customs and logistics. This upfront investment in education with everyone moving is key so that they don’t land and try to operate how they did in their old locations. Whilst people can stay living the way they did before, it becomes uncomfortable, costly and questions the point of relocations. The cloud is no different to needing a strategy for targeted education and communication. Working with teams that are moving to outline the operating changes required to prepare for this change. Extending the education for groups that are not migrating to understand how the new world impacts the traditional operations. It will have a wider impact than just the groups that relocate to the cloud, and so education should be available for all and with different tracks based on your discipline. Gamify and celebrate as much as you can the ones that education and train others.

5 – Find friends & support in your new location to aid your acclimatisation. Like any experience, it is best to learn from others that have been there before you. We are not pioneering at this point in the cloud journey; plenty have trodden the path before and will share their stories.??Friends will freely share information about their journeys. Equally seeking professional guides who have been on this journey before with others will help ease the transition. No matter how you choose to gain visibility and learn from others, don’t discount the value gained from other people's cloud journeys. A secondary benefit of joining these communities is that your collective voices can be ued to improve the cloud platforms with the CSPs.

In conclusion, Cloud relocations are a different level of commitment, and any half effort will, in most cases, result in unfortunate outcomes. Don’t expect your new location to bend to your way of operating. Relocation is not for everyone, but when you are committed to the journey the outcome can be huge on your business. However, if relocation is not for you, then try a staycation on the private cloud. Private Cloud is still an essential part of any cloud strategy. Don’t underrate the staycation; in some cases, it can still lead to massive impact on your IT landscape via Automation, DevSecOps and Agile processes with the comfort of being at home in your data centre. Pick your journey and enjoy.