Richard Seroter, Director of Outbound Product Management for Google Cloud, has spent more than eight years working with enterprise executives, team leaders, and individual contributors on their transition to the cloud. In this article, he shares three things you can do to safely speed up the journey.
If you've adopted the cloud paradigm you're likely to be good at software delivery and operations, which means you're likely to be a successful business. A slow, "safe" move to the cloud delays the realization of these benefits.
gettyI have a confession to make: when I first visited India, I ate at Domino’s Pizza. I know, I know, I was surrounded by one of the world's great cuisines, and I ate an (admittedly tasty) cheese pizza. It felt like a safe bet at the time.
Whether with food choices, financial investments, and even relationships, we sometimes play it safe. We embrace what appears to be the less risky choice. Yet, that "safe" approach may lock us out of greater enjoyment, or even add risk.
This is also true with many IT decisions, especially around cloud adoption. Specifically, if you've tasked an internal committee to work out a five-year, lift-and-shift strategy to public cloud, you're playing it too safe.
A recent O'Reilly Media survey showed that 90% of organizations are growing their public cloud consumption, and almost a quarter expected to move all their applications to the public cloud within 12 months. Does it honestly matter to your business that you use cloud computing? Are the corresponding changes to cost accounting, employee behavior, and software capabilities truly worth it? The data says yes. The "Accelerate State of DevOps Report" by the DORA group researches the link between technology capabilities and organizational performance. The elite companies—those that have greater code throughput and system stability—are "24x more likely to have met all essential cloud characteristics than low performers."
It stands to reason: If you've adopted the cloud paradigm you're likely to be good at software delivery and operations, which means you're likely to be a successful business. A slow, "safe" move to the cloud delays the realization of these benefits. If you're only migrating five apps per month from your two-thousand app portfolio, it’s going to take you 30 years to compete with your software-driven peers.
I’ve spent more than eight years working with enterprise executives, team leaders, and individual contributors on their transition to the cloud. I’ve learned three things you can do to safely speed up the journey.
1. Pay experts to actually do the work
There are plenty of things that can (and will) go wrong with a cloud migration, and simple advice isn't adequate. Including mine. It's critical to invest in legitimate outside help. In a post on her personal blog, noted Gartner analyst Lydia Leong recently shared what she's learned from years of client conversations. She pointed out how external experts "accelerate and improve cloud adoption" while also cautioning against low-quality assistance. Leong cautioned against organizations handing over strategic planning to outside parties entirely; it must be a collaborative effort.
In other words, pay for premium help, but don't outsource your strategy. The outside investment shouldn't result in a 400-page document or 100-slide presentation. Rather, identify experts who can retrain your teams, migrate representative apps that demonstrate a repeatable pattern, and set up best practices for code deployment.
2. Be cautious of what you lift and shift
I can guarantee that you won't meaningfully change every workload and process as you migrate to the cloud. To suggest otherwise would be ludicrous. Some systems won't change at all. Some will get slight modifications. Others will be entirely replaced or rewritten. Same goes for your business processes. To speed up your migration, be intentional about what stays the same, and what changes.
Lift-and-shift is tempting. It feels safe, and fast. But remember what you're after: agility. Moving the existing virtual machines, hypervisors, commercial databases, first-generation config management systems, and middleware components will result in the same complicated deployments, high capital costs, and messy operations you're already dealing with. Look for sensible replacements to swap in as you migrate, and be strategic about where you can gain leverage.
Also, don't lift and shift most of your IT processes. Rethink your change review board, your annual budget process, and any seasonal deployment freezes that your organization may have. These might have made sense for capital-intensive on-premises systems that changed infrequently, but they make less sense when you're shifting your focus to delivering nonstop customer value.
3. Invest heavily in automation and foundational infrastructure
Introduce a big dose of automation while migrating to the cloud. Start with infrastructure provisioning and application deployment.
Your teams will move faster when they can automatically provision environments for their applications. Don't make them guess about what it should look like, or wait weeks while an overworked system administrator builds virtual machines for them. Refocus your operations team on laying down critical shared infrastructure like network connectivity between cloud and on-premises locations, and identity management systems.
Every migrated system should be on a deployment "pipeline" that can deliver security updates and functional improvements via automation, not ticket-based handoffs. Make a best effort to build out a factory where teams can assess the workload, decide a course of action—think retire, replatform, refactor, rewrite, or replace—and follow a blueprint to build a pipeline to production.
At the end of a "safe" cloud migration, you should have processes and systems that help you delight customers with a constant stream of software updates to resilient systems they depend on. It's not easy to get to that state, but it's downright risky to take too much time getting there.
And besides, as much as I love cheese pizza, my world has become so much richer since I’ve embraced vindaloo.
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