14 signs your cloud journey may be off track
Are you having trouble with your cloud migration program? Are your costs mounting? Is the promised “agility” failing to materialise? Are you struggling to convince application owners to make the move? If so, then you may be experiencing the Cloud Migration Gap. In this article we will explain the Gap, why it is a problem, and what you can do about it.
What is the gap?
Migration to the cloud is all the rage today. There is no shortage of articles explaining how to execute on your data centre exit strategy or why you should concentrate on value add and leave the undifferentiated heavy lifting to a cloud provider. There are also plenty of articles explaining how to build your business case; how to calculate the benefits, the innovation dividend, and the ability to reduce costs by turning off unused servers and databases.
All these benefits are real – if they can be captured. So why isn’t it working for you? There may be a number of reasons, but by far the most likely is that your organisation is focused on migrating applications rather than your application teams. This is a common yet critical mistake, as it is your application teams who need to make the transition from traditional IT to Cloud for your organisation to realise the agility you have been promised.
Why is that? Well, let’s compare: In the traditional IT world, how do your teams get things done? Normally they engage an expert – to build a server, perform a firewall burn or add storage. In the self-serve, on-demand nature of the cloud world, we expect teams to engage with a system – a console, a CLI, an API - and get things done for themselves. This is the cloud user journey - the path that the user takes to consume the services offered by the cloud provider, as discussed in Sign #7: Your IT-project pipeline is progressing slowly.
If your organisation is concentrating on migrating applications, rather than teams, then, without even realising it, you are likely replacing the expertise your teams rely on, with a system they do not know how to use. Is it any wonder your application owners are pushing back and you are suffering the Cloud Migration Gap?
Closing the gap
The problem can be particularly acute if you have engaged a cloud partner to handle the migrations. The partner, with deep cloud expertise, will have been tasked with re-engineering your on-prem applications to run on a cloud platform before throwing them over the fence to the application teams. This is the engineering/operations problem introduced in Sign #9: Your IT teams are still divided between engineering and operations, only compressed, as your cloud partner will be timeboxed on delivering the entire migration, not just one application.
Suffice to say, application teams will not readily accept these re-engineered applications without the expertise they have come to rely on, or an extended operational readiness checklist, or extensive training, or likely all three. In all cases, adding costs to your migration program and reducing the agility of your organisation.
Closing the Cloud Migration Gap starts by re-orientating your migration program around uplifting application teams. A journey from a world where they rely on expertise, to a world where they are self-sufficient and can act for themselves - the Product IT teams we introduced in Sign#2: Your cloud service is hidden behind layers of IT processes. When fully enabled, it is these IT Product teams that will realise the agility your organisation has been promised.
In our Symptoms series, we have explored the changes required to create a world where Product IT teams can act for themselves: providing a cloud user journey, introducing a product development model, creating the cloud shared responsibility model, using cloud business cases, moving to a DevOps model. These components make up the Cloud Operating Model your organisation must introduce in order to take advantage of your cloud investment – not just for your migration program, but for your entire business.
By closing the Cloud Migration Gap your organisation will be on its way to realising the benefits that come with a move to the cloud. At DigiRen, we have years of experience enabling enterprise-scale organisations to transition to cloud and we specialize in building Cloud Operating Models that enable businesses to take advantage of their cloud investment. Eliminating the Cloud Migration Gap by focussing your migration program on application teams, requires a deep understanding of cloud operating models and cloud change management. To discuss how we might help, please contact us at solutions@digiren.com.au and follow us on LinkedIn.