Why Urgency for Cloud Went to 11
What the Executives Aren’t Telling You
Congratulations! You own “the cloud platform” for your company. Maybe you applied for the role. Maybe you got volunteered. Most of you are just doing the job because somebody has to.
Regardless, your job is simple: lay tracks in front of a speeding freight train without getting flattened. (I said the job is simple, not easy.)
Why did the company put you in this position? Why are they asking you to move legacy workloads? And why are they pushing so hard now?
The #1 reason I hear from cloud practitioners is: “Because my Management said so.” If you want to be successful, that answer is not good enough. You need to know why the company wants to use public cloud, so you know how they’re measuring success… and you.
Why Public Cloud?
Why are most companies adopting cloud?
Agility.
They aspire to move faster than their competitors. Executives imagine that first to the cloud will get the “multi-cloud, serverless, Kubernetes, microservices, automated, agile, synergistic, digital transformation, IT modernization orgasm of profit!”*
Buzzwords aside, there are real benefits to cloud. It helps companies develop, deploy, and scale applications. It shifts technology costs from large irregular capital expenses to predictable operational expense. Underneath the hype, cloud has value. That’s why it’s growing.
* NOTE: These are actual statements from actual CEO/CIO/CFOs.
Why Move Old Workloads to Public Cloud?
If the business wants to move forward faster, why spend time on legacy applications?
Critical Mass.
Companies have legacy environments, private cloud, and public cloud. The legacy runs the business. Most IT professionals are experts in one legacy discipline — e.g. compute, storage, networking. Since people want to feel useful, they focus on their silo in the legacy environment. That’s why the public cloud never gets enough attention from IT. The only way to drive critical mass to the cloud is to force IT to move the legacy applications to the cloud. And if that saves the company capital expense on equipment and data centers, bonuses for everyone!*
* NOTE: “Everyone” being only those with access to the conference room dedicated to the “orgasm of profit”.
Why are Companies Moving NOW?
Why is management putting so much stress on moving to cloud now?
They’re not. It just feels that way. You moved the EASY workloads to the cloud. Moving the next workloads will be HARD. But the schedule is the same. That’s stressful.*
Executives have been pushing for agility and savings via cloud for years. First, companies adopted SaaS for basic functions. Second, they moved test and development to cloud. Third, they stored cold data in the cloud.
Now that you’ve done the “easy” work, it’s time for the hard job — moving real applications. Real applications keep persistent customer data in databases and files. Real applications are complex. Real applications need availability, security, data protection, and predictable performance. Real applications run the business. (Don’t panic, though. There are many real applications to move before getting to SAP and Oracle.)
Executives are hooked on cloud wins. Those wins “prove” that they’re innovating and beating the competition. The savings feel good, too. At each hardware refresh cycle, moving to the cloud cuts capital expenses. The savings from each cloud step funds the next one. It doesn’t matter that each step gets more difficult. Everything depends on the next hit of capital savings. That’s why executives need you to deliver the next step… now.
* NOTE: I took a class taught by Turing Award winner Michael Rabin. He spent half of each lecture covering simple arithmetic. At the end, he raced through complex math proofs. We asked why he spent so much time on the simple math vs. the hard math. His answer: “It’s all simple to me.” That’s how executives think about cloud. It’s all simple to them.
Conclusion
Businesses need to move to the cloud to compete. It’s not enough to just build some cloud-native applications. They need critical mass on the cloud. That’s why they’re asking IT to migrate legacy workloads.
IT feels tremendous pressure from the business because the next cloud migrations will be hard. There are no more easy wins. You’ve done SaaS, test and development, and archive. Now, it’s time to move business applications. They’re complicated. They have data. They run the business. And they need to be moved now.
Congratulations on owning the cloud platform! Keep running, the train is always coming.
