Can your business afford to fail in their use of Cloud?

Can your business afford to fail in their use of Cloud? What would happen? Will you get a second chance? 

Is your business making sound strategic decisions and following an appropriate path? 

Cloud is great, it makes it really easy to do ‘stuff’, it’s agile and that’s the #1 benefit that businesses are looking for. On the flipside Cloud also makes it really easy to do the same ‘stuff’ badly and by incorrectly architecting, deploying and managing cloud infrastructure your organisation could be setting itself up for failure and disappointment and even worse putting your core business applications and data at risk. 

So who is trusted with guiding your business through this paradigm shift and securing the future of your business in the Cloud? Are you placing your trust in the right hands? 

Is there a good level of knowledge across Cloud: 

• principles and architecture 
• business and billing models 
• models for managing the infrastructure and applications 
• security 
• features and functions of various providers 

If not alarms bells should be ringing and you should re-evaluate your approach. 

Here are some pointers that will save you pain, money and lower your risk: 

• Use people that REALLY know what they’re doing - either hire someone, speak to a consulting firm or educate existing staff – don’t just muddle through. 
• Cloud operations skills are quite different to traditional IT/datacentre skills – realise that if you do train staff that there will be some org change/role alignment required. Your IT team won’t just ‘pick It up’ – although they will disagree with that! 
• Having a play around and testing new technology is a great way to get started but make sure that due consideration is placed around architecture and the base capabilities required when you start deploying for real otherwise you’ll end up in a big mess potentially with a big bill. Have an architecture and a plan. 
• Lastly, don’t reinvent the wheel. Unless your business is NASA chances are it’s probably all been done before. Reuse templates, patterns, advice and learn from others mistakes before you make them. I often speak to customers who spend more time wondering how to solve a problem than it would take us to solve ten times over. 

Hopefully, this has been a helpful thought provoker. If you’d like some advice please drop me a message – don’t worry there won’t be any hard sell.