Is your organization ready for the cloud? Getting started in cloud is all about striking the right balance.
Moving to the cloud offers enormous benefits for businesses. Yet there are risks as well. The challenge is multidimensional, with far-reaching implications not just for the solutions that will run in the cloud, but also for the technologies that support them, the people who need to implement them, and the processes that govern them. The rubric of people, process, and technology is a familiar one. But how do you harness it to move forward?
As one of the earliest organizations to operate entirely in the cloud, Google has been spearheading projects for years that address this very issue from leadership and people management best practices like re:Work, to engineering-driven software operations methodologies like Site Reliability Engineering, to zero-trust security models like BeyondCorp. It is from work such as this that a streamlined framework for adopting the cloud was developed.
Cloud computing is maturing at a scale and speed that can be hard to keep up with. In fact, it can seem as if every week a public cloud provider is announcing a new feature that will run your applications and store your data more scalably, reliable, or securely. And it’s not always easy to know where to start.
Along the way, we’ve seen the sorts of things that can trip organizations up, as well as patterns developing around what makes other organizations successful. Most recently, we’ve seen a shift in the outcomes our customers want to achieve with the cloud. Getting to the cloud has been about tactical cost cutting initiatives building your “mess for less” in the cloud. Over recent years, some of our customers began to ask us much bigger, more strategic, even visionary questions: “How can I use machine learning to provide a better customer service?” “How do I do predictive inventory planning?” Or “How do I enable dynamic pricing?”
These are the types of questions that excite us at PawaIT and we want to help you answer them. But getting to the point where your organization can really thrive in the cloud often requires deep, comprehensive transformation. That can be a tough pill to swallow. And if you’re the one leading that transformation, being able to communicate your plan in a simple, logical way can be critical to inspiring confidence in your vision.
We’ve seen two types of company cultures play out, time and again, in our customer base. For example, many of our cloud native customers have a bias for action. They do many things well: self-sufficiency in pushing workloads into production, highly collaborative teams, and continuous learning and experimentation, just to name a few. But in their desire to move fast, we’ve seen some underestimate the value of putting guardrails in place early to contain the inevitable sprawl of data and compute resources. This omission not only adds cost to their monthly cloud hosting bill, but can also result in security and data privacy challenges in the long-term. In this case, they’ve prioritized speed in the short-term over long-term sustainability.
The opposite can be true for many enterprises new to the cloud. These enterprises often gravitate towards replicating their tried and true governance and operating model in the cloud, spending a lot of time designing process and policies (which are important), but too little time moving actual workloads into the cloud. Without production workloads, they don’t develop the experience needed to manage increasingly complex and business-critical use cases. And without early successes, they can be reluctant to increase investment and ultimately lose momentum in their cloud strategy.
The ideal is balancing the pace of change across your people, process, and technology. That way, you can learn continuously, lead effectively, scale efficiently, and secure your environment comprehensively the four capabilities we’ve observed that drive success in cloud.
These are just some of the insights and best practices we can share to help you get started. To learn more, Download the white paper.
