For many organisations, knowing where they want to go is simple. It is to dominate their industry, sell their products nationally and/or internationally and be immune to disruption. However, disruption is inevitable regardless of vertical – and IT, product and service teams are under pressure to come up with the solutions and tools to safeguard their business.
For most organisations, thinking big is the way to achieve this goal. With the use of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, DevOps philosophies and more they can improve product delivery, unlock a deeper and richer customer profile and get products to market faster. None of these business wins work in isolation – you must think holistically and picture how your Information and Communication Technology (ICT) underpins all these initiatives. In a technology driven world, keeping up with innovation and maintaining that competitive advantage has become a challenge, both from an infrastructure and subject matter expertise (SME) perspective. In simple terms, most organisations require a skilled workforce who can operate intricate processes on complex infrastructure for day to day operations.
To maintain that sought after competitive and innovative advantage, many organisations have, or are planning to move to public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS). The benefits of modern Cloud architectures are endless and the speed at which teams are empowered to innovate enables effective product feedback cycles, delivering critical time-to-market opportunities.
Your Cloud foundation is the key…
In some respects, organisations born in the Cloud take for granted that many day-to-day business challenges faced within traditional ICT operations are a non-event; launching new environments within minutes, almost forgetting that Disaster Recovery (DR) is a big-deal, and living the 24/7 automation workflows lives.
It is therefore understandable that many traditional organisations expect the same golden egg to be waiting once their Cloud migration journey is complete and although an accurate statement for the most part, there is a “but” – which is, to make the most of a Cloud migration, you have to define your “Cloud foundation” with best practices in mind and aligning those with the organisations vision.
A successful Cloud foundation forms the solid base and framework for your big picture projects and long term organisational success, consisting of business perspectives and technical perspectives, each adding value to solidify the organisational capabilities.
Defining a Cloud foundation
A cloud foundation or cloud adoption strategy as it is also commonly referred to consists of a number of perspectives (viewpoints) that should be validated and explored. These perspectives ultimately form the basis of a roadmap for your Cloud adoption and migration planning.
Business perspective
A well-defined Cloud foundation starts with an organisational business perspective, requiring strategic leadership to align business models and IT strategies as a single cohesive vision. It is essential to leave behind the “IT vs. Business” discussions repeated in every boardroom around the world. This aligned business perspective should aim to put the business goals and requirements in the driver seat through the adoption of Agile practices and leveraging flexible technical capabilities offered by Public Cloud providers such as AWS. IT Finance is one of the major areas to address, ensuring the necessary models are in place to adapt to flexible OpEx based infrastructure expenditure offered by cloud services.
People perspective
Be sure to include the perspectives of those vital human resources, the people perspective. Although many skills that fit into traditional ICT is transferable to cloud services and operations, there are at times fundamental differences. Your Database Administrators may still have to manage the health of complex data tables and indexes, however many complex High-Available implementations that need constant supervision may be taken care of by making use of cloud native services. Many of your day to day Systems Operations activities may now require IT skills with some programming or other skills to triage cloud native workloads and provide infrastructure automation as a first class citizen. Human Resources needs to be part of the journey to ensure the organisations workforce is ready and able to facilitate change.
Governance perspective
Many organisations have their Project Management Office (PMO) and IT/Software Engineering operating as two distinct entities, with minimal alignment on the frameworks or methodologies applied. At times, this results in frustration and lost opportunities due to a lack of agility, somewhat true in larger enterprises where most IT-departments have transitioned to Agile delivery methodologies, however mostly still governed by a Prince2/PMBOK oriented PMO. These two methodologies can co-exist and each have their place in the governance and implementation of program and projects, however a successful Cloud foundation should seek out the governance perspective and synergies to ensure most efficient use of organisational resources.
Platform perspective
A core and in many cases overlooked building block of a successful Cloud foundation is the AWS platform perspective, which focus on how your AWS ecosystem will be structured, how accounts will be used, connected or provisioned, how many and the roles of each, etc. It furthermore sets the principles by which all or most of the existing and new workloads (group of applications) will be transitioned or engineered to make best use of cloud services. A fundamental part that if overlooked or not taken seriously will require countless hours of effort and unpalatable opportunity cost to retrofit. The platform definition phase is a step where reaching out to experts in the AWS Partner Network is advised.
Security perspective
Traditional IT environments and Public Cloud providers such as AWS have one thing in common that any CTO will not overlook, and that is security. Although similar in nature, with many of the traditional security vendors having a Cloud footprint, there are key differences at times in the capabilities of each product and how it is implemented within a Cloud native application or ecosystem. Having a clear security perspective to support and harden your AWS platform allows for clear processes that govern access control and data protection within your environment. In a world where 516,380 Australian small businesses fell victim to cybercrime in 2017 (according to Norton), and an estimated 18% jump in security breaches from 2017 to 2018, it should not come as a surprise that security is fundamental to a both a successful organisation and its Cloud foundation. Security by design should be the cornerstone of each project and the responsibility of everyone in the organisation.
Operational perspective
Last but not least, a project or application does not provide business value and that eagerly awaited return on investment (ROI) to owners or shareholders in a development environment. To ensure long term success, may it be internal or external to the organisation, the operational perspective should be evaluated in conjunction with the platform architecture and as part of each application or workload design to focus on how the application or workload is to be monitored, analytical insights obtained for improved business processes, how data is backed up, and in the event of an unplanned incident, how critical workloads will be restored to maintain business continuity. A successful Cloud foundation places the operational perspective alongside the security perspective as core definitions during early stages of IT-project definitions or solution architecture phases.
Every organisation will have varying degrees of the above mentioned perspectives to define and cater for. A large enterprise may validate these perspectives at a workload or divisional level, whereby smaller organisations may be all-in as part of one Cloud foundation definition. Whatever the size or circumstances you may find yourself in, one key take-away is to start with a plan, a business plan and then only a technical plan. Reach out to experts to help guide you through the initial steps and build out a skilled Cloud native workforce and organisation once you found your feet in the Cloud.
Start with a Cloud economics mindset and a good business case in hand…
TL;DR
Digital native organisations born-&-bred in the Cloud take for granted what traditional organisations spent countless of valuable resources on to reach and maintain. Scalability and high-availability is synonymous with Public Cloud providers such as AWS, so it is understandable that traditional organisations assume such benefits once migrated to AWS.
Often overlooked, many Cloud benefits are only truly unlocked with a clear and effective Cloud adoption strategy. Business, People, Security, and Operational perspectives among others make up foundation elements to be considered and validated prior to launching into large scale migrations.
Start with a Cloud economics mindset and a good business case in hand…