I’ve been helping CIOs with their Cloud Computing strategies for over 5
years. The least successful strategies
seem to position cloud as simply an IT budget slashing mechanism. The most successful strategies position cloud
as an enabler to doing things within the business that otherwise would be impossible.
An industry statistic says that 65% of cloud investment decisions are
being made by C-suite business executives without any IT involvement. They are making those choices based upon
business requirements and the promise of how cloud can help meet them. These decision-makers are looking at things
like collaboration capabilities and business agility that cloud enables, not the intricate technical
terminology or functionality.
Yet, I think the IT organization plays an essential role in guiding
the cloud strategy. As technologists and
engineers, we are professional problem solvers but we’re also pretty good at
problem deterrence. Cloud provides
powerful capabilities but it is not the answer to everything. As a matter of fact, I usually say that cloud
is not the solution to anything; it enables solutions. Regardless, when deployed in a sub-optimal
way, cloud-based solutions can actually introduce risks, exposures or even increase
business expenses.
The technology behind cloud is like the themes from my favorite
children’s television shows; it’s about sharing and collaboration – just with a
whole lot of automation. However, all this sharing should
occur with a healthy dose of “stranger danger” akin to what we teach our kids. Not everything should be shared with everyone.
The resources shared in a cloud differ based upon model. There is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
which shares physical assets, Platform as a Service (PaaS) which shares
environments, Software as a Service (SaaS) which shares software solutions and
Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) which shares the full business
process. Each cloud model can be
deployed in private, public or hybrid clouds…on-premises or off-premises.
Yet, somewhere underneath each PaaS, SaaS and
BPaaS solution sits IaaS. It’s just that
in some cloud models, somebody else worries about the daily operations associated with the Infrastructure. But, do not be lulled into indifference... Whether public or private, on-prem or off, the underlying cloud infrastructure is ultimately your concern because of the business implications that can arise from faulty cloud infrastructure.
A single client can and often does deploy multiple cloud models within
the enterprise. You want to avoid
scatter-shod situations where business leaders buy something impulsively or in isolation, and then toss it
over a fence to you in IT to make it work.
Rather, you want to guide the business to create a comprehensive, integrated, enterprise cloud strategy.
The first step is to assemble the team: 1) visionary business leaders to
set direction and overall guidelines, 2) business and technical analysts to help
guide the strategy, and 3) financial and operations experts to deal with the
practicalities of accounting, procurement and operations.
I recommend using the “Practical
Guide to Cloud Computing – v2.0”: published in April 2014 by the Cloud
Standards Customer Council. Here’s a summary
of strategic planning steps from that document modified with some of my
thoughts:
- Educate the team: IT and business people need to understand what cloud is and what it can do as well as the various models.
- Understand the current business and IT environment: Cloud does not happen in a technology vacuum so it is important to understand the current state of both business and IT so that the integration piece is not overlooked in the strategic planning. Integration often provides some of the most profound benefits from a cloud-based solution.
- Understand what the business needs and why: This requires creating the business case for the cloud-based solution.
- Think long-term and enterprise-wide: Don’t just address one business problem or opportunity; look at several business uses for cloud; create a prioritized roadmap.
- Crunch numbers: look at all the costs of implementing cloud and migrating the workload to it; model multiple scenarios.
- Don’t break things: Do an impact analysis to ensure that availability, performance, security, privacy, governmental regulations and internal auditing requirements are addressed.
- Set goals and milestones: Get executive buy-in on metrics; set metrics keeping in mind this is a long-term, multi-stepped roadmap; don’t set milestones so far apart that the stakeholders lose interest or confidence that this will deliver business benefits.
- Understand legal and regulatory implications: cloud-based sharing and sourcing often involves multiple companies and/or countries; it’s essential to understand national and supranational regulatory bodies and compliance mechanisms.
- Create your skills plan: what skills are needed, what skills can/should be developed in-house versus sourced externally? What is the skill acquisition and enablement plan? Make it comprehensive including business people. A lot of technically sound cloud-based solutions struggle to deliver business value because training business people on process changes did not occur.
- Track results through the execution of the cloud roadmap: use trend information to adjust the roadmap; publish successes to build momentum.
- Have a migration and exit process: When are the cloud-based solutions considered “deployed?” What are the responsibilities during and after the migration of workloads into the cloud? What are the service agreements and divisions of responsibility between the internal or external cloud service providers and the business consumer of the services?
A few more key things to consider when developing your cloud strategy:
- Workloads: What workloads have an affinity for providing business benefit if deployed in a cloud model?
- Data: Where should the data reside?
- Integration: What else do you have to integrate this with?
- Governance: What are our new decision-making processes regarding the workloads and data? This involves security considerations too.
- Control: How do we make sure our policies are followed so we don’t have exposures? This also involves security.
I mentioned in an earlier blog article that many CIOs struggle for a seat at the table with the other C-suite executives. Often, introducing the idea of creating an enterprise cloud strategy is a great way to earn a seat at the table.
