Cloud transition and Strategical (mis)alignment

It has been almost two decades since the public cloud started to make an impact in the technology industry. It also has been more a decade since large enterprises started adopting cloud for mostly IaaS use cases.

There are several reasons every organisation wanted to transition fully or partially into Cloud, those can be summarised into:

• Agility
• Uplift the scalability
• Uplift the service level
• Uplift the security
• Initial and Running Cost [Really? yes, please be patient to read further]

These reasons don’t make any sense without any business context such as:

• New business opportunity
• Establishing and running a Startup business
• Expanding into a new region
• Operational excellence
• Reducing business risks

Ultimately everything we do including Cloud transition should advance in the direction to provide a business outcome that’s perceived by business owners in the first place before they agreed for the technical team to move to Cloud.

We could have moved into the best Cloud provider in the world, we cloud have transitioned everyone to adopt Scrum, we cloud have transition everyone to be a DevOps person but if we didn’t provide a business outcome, what we have done so far cloud be called a “debt” for business, yes, a massive technical and process debt!

Success story

 Let’s take a look at a success story where clearly defined strategy and direction potentially saved thousands of lives. This story is from a small Pacific Country called “New Zealand”!

Before Covid-19 has been accepted by WHO as a global pandemic, NZ decided it’s going to be the case and let’s come up with a strategy with no vaccines possible for at least another year. The vaccines are one way to eliminate Covid-19 so how are we supposed to eliminate it without it! But NZ decided to clearly call their strategy as “Elimination Strategy” this made everyone including myself think, it’s impossible without vaccine as this was the only successful solution for an Elimination Strategy.

But the NZ government didn’t stop there, they have done all groundwork to “Go Fast” and “Go Hard” whenever there is a community case. Now not only me, but the entire world knows their achievement again and again which is basically Elimination of Covid-19 without even needing to look for a vaccine!

Once the vaccine becomes available, it could follow the same strategy which is Elimination but the strategy never changes nor the “Go Fast” and “Go Hard” approaches.

Strategy for a successful Business Outcome

Based on that success story you can see the strategy shouldn’t change based on the solution as the great strategy should always focus on the final outcome and there cannot be multiple!

Let’s get back to our on topic, if an organisation’s strategy is “operational excellence” and approaches are going to be “operational efficiency”, “streamline processes” and “continuous improvement” then it’s the same across the entire organisation and doesn’t matter whether you are an expert in Cloud or on-premise. This way, everyone in the organisation is expected to perform their best to align with this unified strategy and bring alone the best solution that might or might not include Cloud.

As a Cloud expert, if you have faith in your Cloud provider and the ability to integrate the Cloud environment will drive a successful Cloud transition that still aligns with your organisation’s Strategy, then the Cloud transition could be a solution. If your chosen Cloud provider doesn’t provide what you wanted to align with your strategy, you just have to pass that feedback to your Cloud provider and move on as you are still expected to deliver to the unified strategy no matter whether or not your Cloud provider is ready.

The same applied to on-premise, if everyone busy managing servers and no one has any time to focus on “operational excellence” then it’s the problem with your on-premise setup, not an issue with your strategy, move on trying to eliminate one problem at a time and work with your counter-part on Cloud side whether they can help to eliminate your problem and remember everyone has to work towards “one” strategy!

Now let’s take a look at some example strategies for the entire organisation.

Operational Excellence

It’s worth understanding the background and context behind why an organisation decide Operational Excellence as their strategy as this could be for several reasons.

• Reducing the number of staff
• Provide a better experience to customers by improving the service level
• Ability to introduce new services faster than your competitor
• Have acquired another company, so the operations should be streamlined across the new companies.

Now let’s imagine you are tasked with leading the Cloud transition, every single decision that you take should be aligned with this strategy and able to address the original reasons for which the strategy was born.

Just because you are tasked with leading Cloud transition, you don’t have to define another strategy such as “Cloud Only” as make your Cloud provider happy and may not be even aligned with your organisation’s strategy. Also decommissioning your data centre may not provide Operational Excellence if you don’t have sufficient skilled staff to manage services once all of them are transitioned into the Cloud.

As a lead of Cloud transition, you could look at defining the SLAs for each service that aligns towards Operational Excellence and if your Cloud experts and Cloud providers can help, then it’s great, otherwise, move on with alternatives.

The initial and running cost of any IT landscape is also a factor in Operational Excellence, just because Cloud from the surface looks cheap and your Cloud Provider offers a massive discount, doesn’t mean you have to migrate everything to Cloud as it’s would be more aligned with your Cloud provider’s Strategy and may not be aligned with your organisation’s Strategy.

But if the services are designed 4 cloud including taking operational cost into account, then it’s definitely a good candidate to transition into Cloud. Normally IaaS not going to be cheaper in Cloud than on-premise, but with their PaaS and SaaS offering, especially for your non-production IT landscape, the cost savings can go to the next level!

De-risk

This is a really complex one and really need better focus from every leader in the organisation to achieve a better outcome.

• Risks from competitors
• Risks of not meeting customer expectations
• Security Risks
• Risks of not meeting regulatory and other compliance attestations
• Ultimately risk of losing the business

As this is quite a large area and potentially there would be so many different reams to help out reducing each type of risk.

If the risks are from competitors about how soon we can provide better services before our competitor does it, then if the same can be achieved within Cloud rather than on-premise, that’s a good case for Cloud transitioning the affected services.

If it’s about Security Risks, the people who are leading in this space should have a clear understanding of the strategies that are adopted by the organisation, just because we have reduced the risk doesn’t mean we have to slow down on everything and just focus on security risk as it may slow down or even block initiatives towards operational excellence. It’s worth understanding the overall security posture, areas where we need to put our effort and areas, that could be outsourced and moving cloud may fall intoin to that category. (Ref cloud-is-middle-tier-in-3-tier-infrastructure)

One of the risks of regulatory and compliance could be that of control framework failures if it’s a large organisation and if the on-premise environment expanded beyond and due to staff limitations and other reasons, we cannot demonstrate the successful implementation of controls framework and if that could be easily achievable in Cloud, then definitely it’s a right purpose for Cloud transition.

The last risk is any organisation’s worst nightmare, yes, the risk of losing the business! If there is no BCP process should they lose the on-premise environment and if Cloud could provide a BCP process by providing DR capability, then it’s a definite alignment towards your organisation’s strategy.  

Expansion

There are several reasons why a business decides to expand, this could involve expanding to a new region, business or expanding partnership.

Normally expanding into a new region involve a separate instance of the entire IT landscape and it’s a good candidate to see whether Cloud transition the right approach. In this scenario, there are more downsides to on-premise than Cloud as you don’t want to build a new data centre just because your business decided to expand the business into a new region. But having said that if your existing data centre has sufficient capacity and provisioning and managing infrastructure is fast and efficient than in Cloud, then Cloud transition is not required.

A new business may or may not come with a new company, if it does require a new company, then it’s almost seen as a startup and it’s really hard to find any valid reason not to go for transition into Cloud unless you can match the same with your on-premise and use the same people to manage new companys’ IT landscape. But worth considering the pros and cons of making use of the same people to look after more than one company’s IT landscape as you don’t want your strategy driven by the limitation of your existing staff!

The expansion of your partnership may or may not involve extending access capabilities of your services to your partners, which could be a primary driver for Cloud transition. Certainly, you won’t give open access to any partner into your internal network, but you could provide access to particular services and it’s worth considering whether providing those services via internet or VPN to partners and perform strong identity-based access controls to let them use your services.

Summary

A clearly defined unified, well communicated and well-understood strategy can take your organisation to a level that’s seen as impossible otherwise. If a team of 5 million in NZ can work towards one strategy, why can’t all of your staff work towards one strategy!

Next time when you do the following, ask yourself how this is aligned to our strategy and:

• VM in on-premise, who is going to manage this?
• VM or Service in Cloud, who is going to manage this?
• A Private IP address in Cloud, how your customer is going to access it?
• New Security tool, how it’s going to reduce the security risk?
• New Strategy, do you really need another one? 

All of you are experts on what you are doing and everyone is special in something, all you have to do is to ask the right question at the right time and apply your common sense. It’s that’s simple!

Disclaimer

This article was produced in my own capacity and experience so it could be beneficial for others; no association could be assumed with the organisation that I am working for now or the organisations that worked in past.