less hurdles, which slow down adoption. Any time a
large enterprise suffers a breach of any kind, the
security fear mongers start squashing public cloud
initiatives, even though most breaches have nothing
to do with the cloud.
Vendor favoritism is another major blocker. I have
seen vendor fanboys try to lead companies down a
suboptimal path because of their loyalty to a legacy
cloud vendor. These fanboys will make a host of misleading statements about the leading cloud vendors
in order to push forward their agenda for false clouds.
They also promote myths about public cloud in order
to force leaders to continue to invest in data center
and do-it-yourself clouds.
A responsible cloud advocate is needed to combat the
politics that nurtures misleading statements about
cloud, misrepresentation of cloud business value and
just plain anti-cloud myths that stall cloud initiatives.
Cultural Issues
The existence of cultural barriers is probably the
number one factor slowing down cloud initiatives.
For many enterprises, moving from traditional computing to cloud computing requires a major shift in
thinking. To take full advantage of cloud computing,
people need to start considering services and cloud
native applications.
Traditionally, enterprises have been accustomed to
building monolithic applications and deploying biannually or perhaps quarterly. The new model is to
deliver small change sets and deploy bi-weekly,
weekly or even daily. To accomplish this, the entire
software development life cycle (SDLC) must be
reevaluated. Frequent deployments rely on full stack
automation. Manual review gates give way to automated security, standard blueprints, automated
patching and proactive monitoring.
This is a radical change from how applications used
to be built, managed and governed. This is why
DevOps is so critical. No, DevOps is not IT automation. It is bigger than that. DevOps is about the entire
value stream, from project inception to running services in the cloud. Enterprises should evaluate their
existing value stream for bottlenecks, and fix those
bottlenecks before performing automation. Otherwise, they are simply automating waste. A major mis-
take most enterprises make is that they only focus on
the technology aspects of DevOps and neglect to
address the required people and process
transformations.
Moving to the cloud indeed requires major transformations. This is why we recommend that companies
leverage our cloud adoption methodology and create
a strategic plan for change that paves the path for
success with their cloud initiative.
Technical Challenges
Building solutions in the cloud can present a number
of technical challenges, especially when the new
cloud applications need to integrate with on-premises solutions. Integrating with non-cloud technologies creates complexity, and complexity creates
chaos, which leads to slow progress.
I have been on many engagements where there is a
requirement to backhaul all cloud related network
traffic back to the existing on-premises data centers.
Integrating with legacy network technologies and
tools creates a significant amount of work and often
leads to suboptimal solutions. It also creates issues
like latency, which in turn leads to more unplanned
work and often workarounds.
Lack of in-house skills and cloud native thinking often
leads to suboptimal architectures. Too often, enterprises take a data center centric approach to the
cloud, resulting in the cloud becoming nothing more
than another data center, instead of a platform for
agility and innovation.
Bringing your old tools to the cloud often creates
suboptimal solutions and unnecessary work in order
to force a square peg into a round hole. I have seen
this play out way too many times. The business sits
idle, waiting for new functionality, while the IT minions waste precious cycles mucking around with suboptimal tools and processes that add zero value to
the business. Take this opportunity to evaluate
replacing legacy tools with either modern SaaS solutions or newer cloud-native tooling.
Poor Execution
Even if you get the previous three issues right, you
still have to manage this complex and transformaFALL 2016 | THE DOPPLER | 5