Translate

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Parting the clouds: tips for creating your enterprise cloud strategy...



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:
  1.  Educate the team: IT and business people need to understand what cloud is and what it can do as well as the various models.
  2. 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.
  3. Understand what the business needs and why: This requires creating the business case for the cloud-based solution.
  4. 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.
  5. Crunch numbers: look at all the costs of implementing cloud and migrating the workload to it; model multiple scenarios.
  6. Don’t break things: Do an impact analysis to ensure that availability, performance, security, privacy, governmental regulations and internal auditing requirements are addressed.
  7. 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.
  8. 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. 
  9. 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.
  10. Track results through the execution of the cloud roadmap: use trend information to adjust the roadmap; publish successes to build momentum.
  11. 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.




No comments:

Post a Comment