Visualizing your cloud strategy and developing cloud competency
Speaking to organizations embracing the cloud, with a clear cloud strategy, results in two reoccurring to-do’s they recommend I will share in this post and dig into.
- You should have simple way to categorize potential cloud projects.
This often requires consideration of numerous dimensions shown visually so all can see the plan. I call this visualizing your cloud strategy.
- You should have a plan in place to increase the cloud knowledge of the organization so they can best leverage the new environment and explore ALL its options. To me this is all about developing cloud competency at your organizations or as an individual.
Let’s dig into those some more.
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The Cloud – Many Hidden Benefits
If you are planning to move to the cloud business plan 
is the first step and often a requirement for most organizations. That plan will contain expected outcomes. The success of the move to the cloud will then be judged by if those outcomes materialize. In this post we explore what most organizations put into those plans.
The post takes a look at the unexpected outcomes organizations, that have jumped to the cloud, are seeing they did not include in their original plans. Lets call those the hidden benefits of the cloud.
The general expected outcomes
Almost every company starts their journey looking into the cloud as a money saving exercise. 
This makes sense as it is rare for investment to happen without some payback expectation. Investments in the cloud are no different.
Costs organizations generally factor into that business case, that they hope cloud can help with, can include many things but often these 4 are always present:
- New hardware capital expenditure as things scale.
- Maintenance capital expenditure around existing hardware (including any extended or special warranties).
- Operational expenditure around running a physical location (buildings, cooling, electricity and more) – could also be a capital expenditure if they have to buy the property outright.
- Capital and/or operational expenditure focused on support and maintenance of parts of the software stack (applying hotfixes, having access to technical support etc).
Continue reading The Cloud – Do You Know The Many Hidden Benefits? →
Your cloud journey – where should you start?
If you are reading this expecting me to tell you the answer then I am afraid I will disappoint you. Every single organization I have spoken to is different and I expect your organization is too. The cloud journey can take many different directions and what is the right place to start for one organization might not be right for another.
Beware of anyone that tells you
their view of the “right answer” without first understanding your company, its priorities, its history and without first showing you the breadth of options available from which you can make your first steps.
This is a journey that needs to be navigated in partnership. It is your cloud journey not mine!
Early advice
- Make sure you understand the breadth of what you can do today in the cloud.
- Make sure you understand there are many different ways to work with the cloud. When you think about your cloud journey remember it is not a one size fits all.
- Think about what your first, second and third workloads might be to decide who will be the best vendor for you.
- Try to avoid falling into the trap of ending up with 10 cloud providers. Remember that learning multiple clouds is not in your best interest longer term and you will probably consolidate later.
- Do something now. Your competitors are.
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Quantifying Cloud Adoption – Is It Really Happening?
In my post from yesterday, Cloud – Are You Already Falling Behind?, I shared my view that there is a shift of many companies to the cloud. In this post I want to share a little external validation that backs that up and helps quantify if cloud adoption is really happening or coming to an organization near you soon!
What the Analysts and Management Consultants are saying
We all know that not everything analysts and management consultants predict, and say, comes true. They are in a tough spot having to predict the future for sure reliant on information flowing from their many contacts and surveys. What we can do though is look at a variety of sources and from that draw some clear conclusions.
- Gartner – Source
- By 2020, a Corporate “No-Cloud” Policy Will Be as Rare as a “No-Internet” Policy Is Today”
- … organizations are saving 14 percent of their budgets as an outcome of public cloud adoption, according to Gartner’s 2015 cloud adoption survey
- By 2020, more compute power will have been sold by IaaS and PaaS cloud providers than sold and deployed into enterprise data centers.
- KPMG – Source
- The question is no longer: ‘How do I move to the cloud?’ Instead, it’s ‘Now that I’m in the cloud, how do I make sure I’ve optimized my investment and risk exposure?
- Cloud continues to drive disruption in the business world across the globe. In fact, a recent global KPMG survey 800 technology industry leaders ranked cloud as the technology that will have the greatest impact in driving business transformation for enterprises.
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Cloud – An Approach For Today And Not Just The Future!
Over the past 10 months, since I joined Microsoft, my eyes have been opened to the realities of the cloud. In that time I have spoken to a large number of organizations who are fundamentally looking to the future.
In those discussions we have been discussing the future of their organizations and especially how they (as examples):
- can improve their agility, lower their overall costs and help them become greener organizations;
- will adapt to the coming 4th industrial revolution and what they need to consider to ensure their organization remains relevant. I even took time out to write about the role IoT will play in that;
- will be able to put the most robust security and privacy in place in the face of increasingly sophisticated attackers;
- can reduce the costs associated with dev/test in particular;
What I have seen, and heard, has convinced me that there is a massive shift happening towards the public/sovereign cloud and towards hybrid cloud (will reference both just as the cloud in the rest of this post). No doubt organizations are now moving, looking to move or thinking of moving major infrastructure and systems to the cloud. I am not speaking hypothetically here but as a matter of fact! Some are moving slower than others but eventually everyone will be there.
Continue reading Cloud – Are You Already Falling Behind? →
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