14 signs your cloud journey may be off track
Are you wondering why no one in your organisation is using your newly built cloud landing zone or taking you up on your offer to be more “agile”? If this is you, then chances are you are not realising the full value of your investment in cloud computing. In this article, we will explain why this is a problem and what you can do about it.
There are a number of potential reasons why people aren’t engaging with your landing zone, but we will concentrate on those that you can directly influence; that is, how your service works and how you expect your potential customers to use the service.
Cloud computing services are different to traditional IT services. In a traditional IT project, an application team will request infrastructure resources, such as servers, databases and storage from an infrastructure team. In response, the infrastructure team will provide a bill of materials (BoM). The BoM has a price tag attached, which will be included in the business case, so the full cost of the infrastructure is accounted for at the start of the project. During delivery, the infrastructure team will purchase new equipment, if required, build or connect the resources as specified and then hand it over to the application team once complete.
By contrast, in a cloud computing delivery model, the resources are delivered on-demand and provided on a self-serve basis. There is no BoM, no hand-over, and no infrastructure team to engage. Further, the cloud resources are priced per use, so there is no upfront cost.
One key mistake many organisations make when building a cloud landing zone is to hide the self-serve, on-demand, pay-per-use nature of cloud computing behind layers of traditional IT process. For example, ask yourself:
Do your application teams have to engage a cloud team to perform tasks such as design and architecture or to deploy resources?
Do your application teams have to use a traditional ITSM tool to request access to resources?
Have you restricted access to certain cloud platform features that application teams require?
If you have hidden the value of cloud computing behind these traditional IT tasks, then you can be pretty sure that your potential customers are looking elsewhere to deliver their applications. The cloud native developers are going directly to the public cloud providers—AWS, Azure, GCP—whilst the traditional developers will stay with their on-premise infrastructure that they at least understand.
So, what can you do about the situation? First, acknowledge the problem! Don’t hide your landing zone behind layers of IT process, a cloud team, ITSM tool, or access restrictions. You cannot offer your cloud landing zone like any old traditional IT service and expect your organisation to use it.
Instead, embrace the value proposition of cloud computing—self-serve, on-demand, and pay-per-use. This is what makes cloud different to traditional IT services. It will attract early adopters within your organisation who would otherwise go directly to the public cloud providers. Over time, as your organisation matures, you will then be able to attract the on-premise application teams as well.
Offering a self-serve, on-demand, pay-per-use cloud landing zone is not easy. It will impact how your organisation builds business cases, the skillset of your workforce as well as their roles and responsibilities, and it will impact how you deliver on your commitments. You will have disputes with your security team, network team, financial team, and your own management.
However, if successful, you will have built a full cloud operating model—the processes, skills and tools required to take advantage of cloud computing. More importantly, your organisation will be much more agile, with an IT group that can respond quickly to changing business circumstances.
It can be done, one step at a time. We will explore the first step in our next article, Our Cloud team are the experts, where we will cover how to inject new talent into your team. This talent will help you re-imagine your cloud landing zone by exposing the cloud computing value proposition to the rest of your organisation.
At DigiRen, we have years of experience building cloud solutions. We specialise in building cloud operating models that enable businesses to take full advantage of their cloud investment. Exposing the core cloud computing value propositions—self-serve, on-demand, and pay-per-use—is fundamental to a successful cloud operating model. If you would like to know more, please contact us at solutions@digiren.com.au and follow us on LinkedIn
The next article in this series: 'Sign #2: Your cloud service is hidden behind layers of IT processes', explores how the make-up of your cloud team may be hindering your attempts to expand usage of your landing zone.