ble products which, in turn, decrease operational and
maintenance costs, reduce the time your staff spends
on fixing bugs and frees them up to do more. All that
is money as well. Who keeps track of all this? Well, the
finance team does (or at least should). They should
not simply receive the cloud bill and enter it in the
appropriate bucket in the general ledger. Finance
should work with IT to truly understand the value
they get out of the cloud versus the investment they
put into it. This concept is also applicable to current
on-prem IT; it is just that cloud makes it easier to
truly understand what IT is costing you. It might not
be a glamorous exercise, but at the end of the day, the
company needs to know that they are putting X dol-
lars into IT, and getting X plus something out of it.
The finance group should be the superheroes who
have that data.
Security
“You don't want the truth, because deep down in
places you don't talk about at parties, you want
me on that wall. You need me on that wall!”
—Jack Nicholson as Col. Jessup
in “A Few Good Men”
Security is sort of like that. We live in the days where
hacking attempts, data theft and denial of service
attacks are practically everyday occurrences. Yes,
security folks can be regular save-the-day heroes
when these unfortunate events occur. However, more
often than not, they are the people who work behind
the scenes to ensure that companies do not actually
make the front page of The New York Times. Unfortu-
nately, InfoSec groups have historically been per-
ceived as almost blockers to moving forward with
cloud programs, because they had to review, bless
and approve anything that touched production. The
cloud is changing this paradigm. Yes, the application
developers are the ones who get the credit for rolling
out a new cool app into production, but the InfoSec
team is there to weave security into the automation
process and enable that application to be secure both
before it goes to production and while it is operating.
Even though cloud is
commonly associated
with technology, it
is much more than
servers, storage and
networks.
Management
You read it correctly. Management is a quiet super-
hero that does not jump out at us when we think of
cloud. One might think that management only asks
“when is it going to be done?” questions, but that is
not the whole story. True management, and more so
true leadership, requires providing the vision and
aligning the organization to ensure everyone knows
where they are going. Management should ensure
that the cloud business case is clearly defined, the
economic proposition is understood, everyone’s
expectations are aligned and all who are involved
know their roles and responsibilities on the journey.
More importantly, management should enable the
team by helping remove any obstacles along the way.
Finally, and most importantly, management must
approve the budgets for these initiatives.
It Takes a Village
As the famous saying goes, “it takes a village to a raise
a child.” It also takes a whole company to have a suc-
cessful cloud adoption. Even though cloud is com-
monly associated with technology, it is much more
than servers, storage and networks. It is a carefully
choreographed set of activities, among a number of
different stakeholders, that enables the organization
to derive value from the latest technological revolu-
tion cloud brings with it. Do you know who your cloud
superheroes are? If you can only think of the elev-
enth-hour rescue ones, your cloud adoption might
not be on the right track.
FALL 2018 | THE DOPPLER | 81