Six Reasons Why Your Cloud Strategy Must Include a Plan for Change
Joey Jablonski
We have seen the same story play out over the years . A new disruptive technology appears and companies dive head first into learning and then implementing it . However , very little attention gets paid to the human impacts .
In 2016 , here we go again . Companies are embracing cloud computing along with DevOps , infrastructure as code , and possibly even microservices and containers , yet once again we see people and process issues slowing down broad adoption . When will we learn ?
Why is it so important to focus on organizational change when adopting cloud computing within a large organization ? Let ’ s look at a few examples of how the cloud changes the way we operate .
Speed of Delivery
To meet the business demands of getting new services to market faster , many enterprises are embracing the DevOps movement . Enterprises who are successful moving towards an agile delivery model are able to deploy smaller change sets to production more frequently . Traditionally , enterprises subscribed to quarterly or biannual release cycles . These legacy deployment models accommodated large testing windows , numerous manual review gates and tons of planning sessions .
This mindset change from deploying large monolithic applications only a few times a year to deploying small services weekly or biweekly , drastically changes the operating model required to manage and run the applications . Testing windows are drastically compressed , driving the requirement to increase the amount of automated testing . There is no longer time for several manual review gates to review architecture , security , quality , etc .
Rapid deployments drive the need for high levels of automation , self-service provisioning , continuous security monitoring in production , proactive monitoring and many other modern day practices . Handoffs between silos must give way to a more collaborative approach to building and deploying software .
Many enterprises think that implementing continuous integration ( CI ) and continuous delivery ( CD ) will solve all their problems , and focus only within their development silo . Although CI / CD may greatly reduce the time it takes to build software , they do not address all the process that occurs before and after the build process , which is typically loaded with waste . DevOps is about the end-to-end software development lifecycle ( SDLC ), not just CI / CD . Enterprises must factor in the process and people changes required to make the entire SDLC flow optimally from left to right .
Delivering Services vs . Delivering Products
As companies shift from delivering large monoliths to delivering services , a major mindshift is required across the company . With a product , once it ’ s deliv-
70 | THE DOPPLER | SUMMER 2016