Cloud migrations are not for the timid

Everywhere we look, organizations are trying to get to the cloud as quickly as possible. This trend – underway for years – has been dramatically accelerated by the current pandemic. Some are rushing to move what they have to hyperscale providers like AWS/Azure/GCP, some are now moving to net new cloud-native architectures, and most are doing some form of “drop and shop” as they jettison installed legacy systems for new SaaS-based platforms. 

I recently came across the Gartner piece below on lessons learned from those who have moved to the cloud.  There are few organizations better at writing technology research than Gartner, but it struck me that this whole piece could have been distilled into one simple lesson – “Figure out what success looks like in the cloud and then commit to making it happen”.

A couple decades ago, someone told me that a paradigm shift occurs when something scarce becomes available in abundance.  We have seen that with growth in compute power, expansion of high-speed global connectivity, and rich capability in mobile devices.   But the early days of each of those was marked by a perspective of them being incremental improvements. 

I remember someone testing an early smartphone (“smart” by the standards at the time) with location awareness.  They commented that it worked… but that it was pretty useless. “The only application I can think of is telling me the weather where I am – and I already know that!”   They simply couldn’t fathom a world where a GPS in your pocket unlocks so much value that we can hardly imagine a world without it.

I fear the same is true for many of the recently accelerated cloud transitions.  Instead of asking the really big questions of how these new abundant global programmable services could really change the way the business operates, folks too often look for incremental improvements in availability or cost reductions that basically mark time while a competitor – traditional or completely unexpected – makes the big leap and transforms the market in which they operate.

My advice is simple – don’t be afraid to be a winner and make the big bet.  Establish the disruptive vision, hire the right people, and embrace the fact that the change won’t be seamless.  What seems like risk now is actually the only path to thriving on the other side.

https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/4-lessons-learned-from-cloud-infrastructure-adopters/