Understanding the “Why”
This is something CTP’s business model could have helped
with. HPE had set a goal to move 60 percent of our work-
loads to the public cloud, but we did not consider the many
factors involved in making migration decisions. CTP helps
customers understand the “why.” Our problem was, we had
no clear idea of why we should move workloads into cer-
tain buckets at certain times. We just wanted to do it.
Our move to Azure had some hiccups. We had very little
understanding of the time it would take to do the migra-
tions. Our culture didn’t put a premium on scheduling –
doing little things like spinning instances down on the
weekends when nobody in the organization would need
the resources. That cost us a lot of money because the con-
trols weren’t there.
We also did not instill a direct relationship between our
on-ramp to the cloud and our use of on-premises infra-
structure. These were seen as two separate processes that
were not connected. Control and transparency between
environments is essential when you are making the transi-
tion between VMs and the public cloud.
If we were to do it all over again, having a Cloud Business
Office (CBO) to direct traffic and manage those relation-
ships would be critical to the success of the project. A CBO
gives structure to the business owners and makes sure all
functions are handled – everything from security to pro-
curement, to finance, to executive reporting. The CBO
holds people accountable and ensures the project is done
right.
Conclusion
These days enterprises face stiff competition from cloud-
borne companies that are not saddled with legacy costs
and processes. Cloud-first transformations can help enter-
prises close competitive gaps and get ahead. But they can
be a challenge to pull off, given the number of obstacles
companies can encounter along the way. At HPE we
learned a lot of lessons on our sometimes circuitous jour-
ney to the cloud. With a little more planning and a little
more understanding of the migration process, other com-
panies can follow more of a straight line to get to their own
cloud destinations.
Scott Anderson is Vice President of Global Strategic
Accounts with HPE.
SUMMER 2018 | THE DOPPLER | 35