How to Champion Cloud Adoption in your Organization
Stephen Garden: Alex, welcome to CorpInfo. This is something we started doing recently - filming blog series, topics in cloud computing; we're really pleased to have you part of the business. We know that you’ve had a great deal of experience working with enterprises on their AWS adoption, so we're looking forward to hearing a few things about your experiences today.
Alex Capehart: You got to have executive buy-in on the migration to AWS. This includes: the financial team, security team and IT team, if they’re not already involved. You really need to have them fully focus on the AWS adoption and C-level suite behind it. And the other caveat about it is you have to be able to look at this as a new paradigm shift. This is not like purchasing a traditional IT Data Center this is completely new, this is cloud.
Stephen Garden: So what you're saying is it requires a whole new set of rules, a new set of processes and you can’t take the same approaches that would have worked in the past through forward to this next transformation.
Alex Capehart: You have to look at things like server-less architecture, micro service architecture; you've got to look at how your teams are being developed. You really need to take a hard look at DevOps. Cloud is built natively for DevOps. If they're able to embrace it, you're going to see transformation, you're going to see speed & agility coming to your corporation in your lines of business.
Stephen Garden: Okay, Alex, so we’ve got the leadership buy-in and executives are behind this, what's the next step?
Alex Capehart: What I have seen in my experience is you need to find measurable test workloads typically in software development, where the success is measurable. Essentially have the team just go and start working with it. The members of this team are usually the thought leaders in your organization and they are the ones who’re going to lead the charge.
Stephen Garden: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, positive PR for the team, positive PR for the cloud and start championing the objectives of the project.
Alex Capehart: It starts to grow from there. When other teams start seeing success happening in software development or maybe even a Big Data team, that have broken off from the main IT and they're working on a project and things are being deployed and things are happening, other lines of business will start contacting the thought leaders and then IT will start to want to get involved in both the production side, as well as the more traditional sides of the business. So Steven, let me ask you now, what you think is the next natural step and progression?
Stephen Garden: Yes, following a bit of experimentation, I’ve seen a natural break, pause point, within organizations who will seriously reconsider and review their strategy behind ongoing operations in the cloud. Most people will figure out a way one way or another to get the workloads into AWS. But actually the true value and the reason why people want to embrace the cloud, is to deliver ongoing benefits for their business. Now there's obviously something about your current operations, your current architecture today that is not working for you. Otherwise, you wouldn't be looking at cloud computing and so it's natural that you shouldn't then take the same toolsets, processes, systems into the cloud and try manage the architecture in the same way because you get the same result. This is the perfect break point for an organization to actually revisit their operations model and to figure out a smarter and better ways of doing things in the cloud.
Alex Capehart: It’s very similar to their journey CorpInfo been on.
Stephen Garden: That's right, yes, as a 33-year-old business, we had a technical debt. We had to go through this process of reinventing a whole business model and reskilling, retraining our teams and going back to the market with an improved value proposition. The managed services business in particular has given us a great opportunity to reinvent ourselves. We’d be delivering these Operational Support Services since the 1990’s and the cloud has been a unique opportunity where we can push the heavy lifting to the cloud providers, and focus on value-added services for our customers.