Cloud Economics:
• Are you paying only for what you use? Not just with AWS, Azure and/or Google
but with your SaaS applications AND even with your on-premises hardware?
• Do you have automated controls in place to ensure all workloads are continually
optimized economically?
• Can you automatically reconcile actual cloud spend back to the projections out-
lined in your original business case?
Technology:
• Are you using the truly transformative services cloud platforms offer today, or did
you simply lift and shift VMs out of your data center into AWS, Azure and/or
Google?
• Do you have a strategy to untangle your application landscape mess and refactor
applications to take advantage of the latest technologies?
This is not an exhaustive list, but in the interest of brevity, you can see where we are
going. If you answered “no” to any of the above questions, you are not getting the full
virtue of “cloud-ing.” Please also remember that this really is a journey: We have yet to
see any large, complex, heavily regulated organization achieve cloud adoption in a day.
In an effort to be constructive, we would like to leave you with some basic tenets to con-
sider, as you try to drive a common understanding of cloud:
• People first. This starts with leadership. If your leadership team does not have a
common understanding of why you are adopting cloud, the masses will not
either, and you can count on serious trouble ahead.
• Only pay for what you use. Whether it is with public cloud, SaaS applications or
even on-premises hardware (yes, even on-premises hardware), demand cloud
economics from every vendor in your supply chain. If they cannot provide this,
look elsewhere.
• Do NOT mistake virtualization for true cloud. Simply lifting and shifting VMs
from on-premises into bare-metal servers on AWS, Azure and/or Google may
have some virtue in limited scenarios — e.g., consolidating/shutting down data
centers, or disrupting an outsourcing agreement coming up for renewal. But the
true value of cloud lies in modernizing applications and platforms to take advan-
tage of all that the cloud has to offer.
10 | THE DOPPLER |
SUMMER 2019