The Doppler Effect
If you were to do a simple Google
search on “The Cloud’s Dirty Little
Secret,” you would find several articles
aimed at enlightening the marketplace
on the secret little “surprises” enter-
prise IT teams encounter when under-
taking a large public cloud transforma-
tion project. One particular Forbes
article from May of 2014 opined about
how large, complex IT organizations
need to think very differently about
domains such as security, future oper-
ating models, the development of engi-
neering talent and more. Fast forward
to the present day and these are no
longer “dirty little secrets,” nor are
they surprises.
Over the years, The Doppler has con-
sistently documented how you should
think about all the potential pitfalls in
cloud transformation. Yet our clients
keep coming to the same conclusion:
the benefits of going big on the public
cloud outweigh both the risk and the
level of effort. That said, while we have
helped many businesses navigate these
challenges successfully, a new “dirty
little secret” needs to be exposed and
addressed.
At CTP, we help many clients build a
board-quality business case for going
big on the public cloud. These business
cases include far more than simple
TCO calculations comparing certain
services like compute, network and
storage costs between our client’s data
center and their public cloud of choice.
As one might suspect, these business
cases also include big cost saving vari-
ables, such as data center consolida-
tions and/or shut downs. No secret
there...right?
Guess what else becomes clear in these
business cases? We consistently see
how the automation in these hyper-
scale platforms of AWS, Azure and
Google can render a large percentage
of the operational staff unnecessary,
and therefore a target for massive
annual cost savings.
We recognize that while certain job
functions may be automated out of
existence, the people in those func-
tions still have great value to the enter-
prise. We encourage our clients to
decouple the role from the individual,
and to recognize that the company has
invested quite a bit of time, effort and
money in developing them over the
years. It is not an act of altruism to see
if these people can develop the skills
necessary to help the organization
become more agile and disruptive.
These very people can in fact become
differentiators for the future.
Starting on page 62, we expose this
latest “dirty little secret,” and identify
some of the roles at the highest risk of
elimination. But we also detail where
each role can be morphed to add more
value to the company, and how individ-
uals can develop these valuable new
functions. The need for these individu-
als has not gone away. It has simply
changed — for the better.
Bruce Coughlin
Chief Executive Officer
WINTER 2018 | THE DOPPLER | 1