I was surprised there was
so much unease around
the change and found
that transparency and
the concentrated training
efforts helped alleviate
the uncertainty.
Changes in IT
Inside IT we adapted to our share of changes. I
restructured the department in order to carve out a
group of six people from the infrastructure team and
put them in change of infrastructure automation. The
team leader – who had experience in software man-
agement, DevOps and cloud – focused this group on
all the modern cloud pieces and the modernization of
the internal virtualized environment.
We also instituted a series of process changes, includ-
ing realigning our release management processes
and our security processes. We didn’t adopt a full CI/
CD model because we have no need to continuously
deploy new, updated versions of our software plat-
form. We chose an alternative approach that func-
tions better in a highly governed vertical like financial
services: essentially creating a “version 2” of pro-
cesses followed in the data center model rather than
making wholesale changes.
These changes helped make IT more efficient. We
have been able to deploy infrastructure changes at a
much more rapid rate. Also, with the scale-out infra-
structure, we can have infrastructure dynamically
configured to meet the needs of our end users. We
have the ability to spin up resources quickly so our
time to market for many of our infrastructure stacks
is very short. Projects can move through the queue
very quickly. Time to market for getting infrastruc-
ture ready used to take days or weeks compared now
to hours or days. Our mean time to remediate is also
a lot faster.
Conclusion
Our cloud transformation project was a big under-
taking, but we are happy with the outcome. We have
met our goal of closing our physical data center and
retaining only a few mission-critical applications in a
local co-located facility. We have effectively aligned
our organization around a new way of operating.
Although the education portion of the project proved
challenging at times, we were able to navigate and
move along faster than expected. We learned that
with the right level of training and exposure we were
able to mitigate the fear factor and create an atmo-
sphere of inquisitiveness about cloud efficiencies.
Getting ahead of the issue, helping our workforce
understand the transformation process and learning
how the changes directly impacted associates were
the key factors in our successful cloud migration.
FALL 2018 | THE DOPPLER | 19