Having trouble championing cloud adoption in your organization? Watch our subject matter experts Stephen Garden, VP of Cloud Services, and Alex Capehart, Head of Sales, discuss how to get your team on board and using the cloud to grow your business in our How to Champion Cloud Adoption in your Organization blog post.
Video Transcription
Stephen Garden: 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 specifically regarding cloud adoption within those organizations.
Alex Capehart: Of course, when you are looking to migrate to AWS, you have to have executive buy-in. 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 with the C-level suite behind it. And the other caveat about it is that you have to be able to look at this as a new paradigm shift. This is not like purchasing a traditional IT data center; it 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. This is a new 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 and take a hard look at DevOps. The 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 and agility coming to your corporation and in your lines of business.
Stephen Garden: Okay, Alex, so let’s say we’ve got the leadership buy-in and our 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 go get started and 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 group and are working on a project and things are being deployed and happening, other lines of business will start contacting the same thought leaders and then IT will start to want to get more involved in both the production side, as well as the more traditional sides of the business. So Stephen, 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 one way or another how to get their workloads into AWS. But actually the true value and the reason why people want to embrace the cloud, is to deliver the 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 tool sets, processes, and 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 way of doing things in the cloud.
Alex Capehart: It’s very similar to the journey we’ve has been on.
Stephen Garden: That’s right, yes, as a 33-year-old business, we had technical debt. We had to go through this process of reinventing a whole business model and reskilling and 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 had been delivering 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.
Contact us to learn more about how we can help your organization champion cloud adoption. Our team of experts will help get you started with a general discovery that covers both the business and technical areas of the organization. From there we work together to help strategize the best cloud solution to take your business to the next level.
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