7 lessons from battle-hardened cloud adopters
Scroll down for tips on strategy, skills, governance, security and more.
Why move to public cloud now?
Data centre exit, agility and innovation have always been drivers, but our panellists reported new trends emerging:
Sustainability
Because hyperscalers can help reduce carbon footprint.
Access to talent
Because the best developers want to work with cutting-edge tech.
Security
Given the current geopolitical situation and the combination of robust posture + flexibility.
CapEx to OpEx
A huge driver given the inflationary economic environment.
How do you measure success with cloud adoption?
01. Be application-specific
For example:
Sales per second
- View per hour
- Costs going down while deployments go up
02. Use in-built Hyperscaler tools
Like for cost analytics and security posture
03. Be flexible
“[Our initial success factor was] that we modernise applications. We went along pretty well and did some proofs of concept with Nordcloud and Microsoft. But when the macroeconomics changed, our organisation’s whole approach changed as well. The appetite for investing hugely to move an application from one sourcing provider to another was gone. We learned a lot of lessons we’re applying to the per-application modernisation, but we didn't go ahead with the big projects. It gave us a lot of insight into the fact that we have to adapt the strategy to the macros.”
Kaveh Djavaherian, Global Director of Cloud at Electrolux
Neglect upskilling at your peril
Our panellists’ top tips were:
Create communities
So devs get the push and know-how to cloudify and use modern cloud solutions.
Gamify
Challenges, competitions, badges, belts – they get great take-up.
Integrate
Upskilling should be part of inductions and development plans.
Upskill senior people, too
You need the people making strategic decisions to understand cloud. If they don’t know what a subscription is, you’ll have problems.
Reskill
Because there’s a huge shortage of competent IT people. Find those people with a drive to innovate.
Use good partners
“Cloud is accelerating so fast. Something you knew a year ago might not be the same today. You need to stay on top of everything – otherwise it can be a risk.”
Robin Bremsén, Business Group Lead at Microsoft Azure
“Enterprise scale is an excellent way to get started. If you utilise that, you benefit from so many years of experience – you don't start from zero, you start from something like 5 years in. Your developers don't need to think about things like how they deploy an application to cloud or networking, user creation, access keys, etc. You can then start thinking about innovation at a higher speed.”
Hamin Mousavi, Principal Cloud Architect at Nordcloud
“[With cloud and landing zones], we say it’s like a hotel. We built a hotel and created rooms of a certain size, etc. Within that room, you can do what you want.”
Kaveh Djavaherian, Global Director of Cloud at Electrolux
Central governance is a must
Our panellists agreed that you need central governance through a Cloud Centre of Excellence, but your delivery mechanism will depend on how your organisation is structured, for example:
- Federated – CCoE provides security and guardrails with a landing zone – and teams take it from there
- More centralised – CCoE provides more tools – up to driving and deploying all templates, pipelines and code
…Consider the balance between security and innovation…
“If you restrict things extremely, then you have an extremely secure environment…it will be completely regulated to the lowest level so you can’t even deploy anything.”
Kaveh Djavaherian, Global Director of Cloud at Electrolux
…And think about what tools/services to whitelist and blacklist
At Electrolux, the Cloud Office owns all processes and tools across the software development lifecycle (e.g., Atlassian suites, JIRA, Azure DevOps, GitHub).
“Should we just allow anything because the development community wants it? Which tools and plug-ins should they use? Those are huge questions. We don't have an answer to all of them, but we try our best to make sure that we have some control of it, at least from a repo perspective…We also try to whitelist services and encourage people to think about operations, because someone needs to be available at 2am.”
Kaveh Djavaherian, Global Director of Cloud at Electrolux
Cost management: Do’s and Don’ts
DO'S
- Use tools – built-in with your hyperscaler and/or third-party
- Have cost structures for innovation – so you can ‘put a price on it’
- Look at costs before deployment – proactively evaluating what’s in the pipeline
DON'TS
- Think of optimisation as a one-time project – constantly see how you can re-scale, work with reserved instances, etc
- Get discouraged when you hit a ceiling – because there’s only so much a central function can do to optimise, and that’s where FinOps comes in
Security top tips
Hyperscaler security isn’t all-inclusive
It’s a good base layer, but you’ll need top-ups based on your requirements.
Constantly evaluate your environment
Use tools/automation/ partners, but you need that 24/7 monitoring.
Have an expert help you prioritise
Recommendations can be overwhelming. Have monthly partner meetings to assess criticality.
Have Open AI policies
Do you allow teams to use it? Can you use the data within those services? Someone needs to make these decisions and set up policies.
If they had a time machine…
What our experts would go back and tell themselves
Don't be afraid to push more
“When I started, I was very cautious. Understand the bureaucracy of the organisation and use it to your advantage – and just go ahead.”
Kaveh Djavaherian, Global Director of Cloud at Electrolux
Don’t treat cloud like an on-prem data centre
“A common situation is where people migrate to cloud and then just build another data centre and innovation stops (especially for those doing a lift and shift). They don't upskill internally. They’ve just moved from one data centre to another, and maybe they had good reasons, but I can get quite frustrated because they have a great opportunity to move to the next step.”
Robin Bremsén, Business Group Lead at Microsoft Azure
Let there be shadow IT when it comes to cloud
“Because when you give access, that's when you see people innovate as much as possible. Let there be accounts within your subscription where you don't know what's happening. Let there be people who start during their induction – give them the credentials and let them innovate and upskill themselves.”
Hamin Mousavi, Principal Cloud Architect at Nordcloud
