The Doppler Quarterly Winter 2018 | Page 3

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