Start with the organizational buy-in. When a company
embarks on a cloud project and brings in outside resources
to help move it forward, it needs to create a central “office”
to serve as a focal point for the undertaking. A Cloud Busi-
ness Office (CBO) handles this function. It coordinates all
key decision-making and communications for the cloud
program – both inside and outside the company. The CBO
also establishes the guidelines for the right mix of apps and
data and the placement of those resources.
Having a CBO establishes a mechanism to ask the right
questions to help make the choices that create the right mix
for a particular client organization.
What are the right questions?
First, we must ask the questions that will frame the business
objectives of the company. For years, cost was the overrid-
ing factor – and in some cases, it still is. If
a company wants to be a competitive,
low-cost provider, it needs to create a mix
that both delivers value to the market
and keeps its own costs low. If a company
has other objectives in mind – speed to
market, escalating M&A activity, global
expansion, being a differentiated leader
in its industry – it might make different
decisions about how it wants to sculpt its
cloud program.
•
Culture and organization – How skilled is the
workforce, and how culturally ready is the company
to shift from one platform to another? If the organi-
zation is used to Azure Stack, and has no experience
on Google Cloud Platform, it might tilt toward Azure
if it wants to expand on the public cloud. Speed of
deployments based on skilled staff is a core principle
of any program.
•
Process and governance – How disciplined is
the client company in terms of process and gover-
nance? Can IT make decisions and force developers
and communities to adhere to those decisions, or is
the process ad hoc? If teams are not aligned –
whether it be for technical or political reasons – the
speed of deployments is greatly reduced.
The facts are, IT
setups grow in fits
and starts, and
platforms often
get shoehorned
in odd ways.
Second, we must understand what
“guardrails” a firm needs to enforce. In
theory, a client organization can pick whatever platform it
wants – AWS, Azure, Azure Stack, OpenStack, bare metal,
etc. In reality, a particular company may have limits imposed
in ways that exclude some of those choices.
Key guardrails:
•
Security and compliance – Are there security
regulations, compliance rules, country-specific rules
or state rules regarding data limits and the choice of
locations? Consider data residency issues between
countries and even states. The impact of placing the
data in a highly regulated data privacy country could
be devastating to the success of the program, and
potentially to the company.
60 | THE DOPPLER |
WINTER 2019
Understanding the business
needs and the guardrails imposed
on an organization starts to pro-
vide clarity around how the orga-
nization will structure its mix of
resources.
Different Mixes for
Different Situations
There is no optimal formula that
suits every client company. The
right mix for one organization will
be different from the next. One
firm may have the exact same app portfolio as another, but
it has different business goals and different guardrails limit-
ing its choices.
There are over 40 factors to take into account when making
decisions on the best mix of platforms and services. Cost, of
course, is one. Others include performance, latency, risk,
data needs, network connections, architectural consider-
ations and security.
One key question is, just how important is each individual
business goal or guardrail to a particular organization?
Again, each company is different. So, when the CBO starts
debating the merits of one scenario vs. another, it needs to