Are you in control of your cloud?

Cloud is here to stay, as more and more organizations are adopting cloud technologies to leverage scalability, enable agility, and optimize costs while striving to stay in control. 

Across industries, cloud continues to be one of the fastest-growing segments of IT spend. With greater spend, however, comesgreater responsibility for CIOs to invest budgets wisely, and a bigger impact if things go wrong. - Gartner 2020

‍What are some major challenges faced by organizations?

As cloud adoption accelerates across industries, management struggles in staying in control of their transformation. Some major factors that add up to ineffective cloud adoption are:

1. Lack of skilled professionals: Organizations are struggling to keep their professionals skilled with the fast-paced innovation in cloud technologies. Mammoth cloud service providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google release umpteen new cloud services each year. There is an urgent need for reskilling and upskilling professionals to help organizations in cloud their journey.
2. Not starting-up right: Owing to the bandwagon effect, small and medium scale organizations tend to jump the gun and move to the cloud without proper planning. Lack of a well-defined cloud adoption vision leads to problems such as losing control of their cloud adoption, friction between technology and operational teams, uncertainty in goals. This leads to siloed cloud adoption with a handful of teams, ultimately introducing more risks and inefficient utilization of the cloud.
3. Management hesitance citing risks: Traditional risk management function and management heads tend to be more skeptical around risks introduced by moving to the cloud because of the gap in experience and knowledge around new technologies.

How to do it right?

The cloud adoption journey starts with meticulous planning. One should start by defining a robust cloud adoption vision and carefully plan out your focus areas.

Several cloud service providers have come up with well-architected frameworks to provide architectural best practices across the five pillars for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud.

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To efficiently consume the cloud, you should consider:

1. Mandate Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) function to operate and provide support architects, developers, security teams with governance mentioned in the “5 pillars of a well-architected framework”.
2. While conceptualizing solutions on the cloud environment, architects and developers should take into account guidance mentioned in the “5 pillars of a well-architected framework”.
3. Proper automation and guardrails should be set up by leveraging cloud-native services to ensure a balance between speed and agility.
4. An interaction and governance model should be devised to oversee the adoption and define tangible and achievable KPIs.

The rapid adoption of new cloud technologies that enable organizational agility must be securely adapted based on the organization’s cloud vision. Organizations seeking to adopt cloud computing must consider five pillars of a well-architected framework and leverage best practices laid down by industry-leading cloud service providers.