Customer First in the Cloud Economy

The onslaught of features, solutions and integrations from cloud providers (not to mention sales incentives) has unfortunately resulted in Cloud Migration/ Adoption plans replacing actual business planning. As noted by Gartner "Cloud should be thought of as a means to an end. The end must be specified first". Unfortunately, for most firms, this rush to cloud, both from the supplier and customer community has resulted in business strategy lagging cloud adoption.

This is particularly evident in enterprises who have not been able to fully realize the benefits of cloud adoption and are now being pressed to look for brokerage, monitoring, audit, security and cost optimization solutions for their cloud deployments. Cloud was meant to be simple and manageable and not this complicated beast that needs to be tamed through more monitoring and management solutions.

Make no mistake, Cloud is an excellent "TECHNOLOGY DELIVERY" model with benefits extending beyond cost, however we should ensure that we don't turn Cloud into this complicated mess that is in need of disruption and reset.

The recommended approach in ensuring that we prioritize strategy ahead of cloud deployments is to strip away all the Cloud bells and whistles and focus on balancing the (workload) priorities with (cloud) cost primitives as depicted below.

It does not matter if you are considering Azure VM, AWS S3 or Google Cloud Functions. All Cloud flavors (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), deployments (Private, Public, Hybrid) and offerings (base and advanced) from all cloud providers operate on this common set of fundamentals.

At the risk of oversimplifying, CLOUD WORKS BEST WHEN AGILITY MEETS COST. This also drives another important point. You don't have to be on Cloud to be relevant. Automation, Virtualization, SDN are examples of technology approaches that work great in non cloud environments too. There is a reason why Mainframes continue to be relevant despite the "Cloud" onslaught.

So, how do we ensure that we do what is right for the client and their business outcomes when positioning cloud? Here are some suggestions:

1) Put yourself in your customer's shoes: Listen to your customers and i mean really listen. All of us are tuned to believe that we have to provide solutions in the first meeting. At times, what our clients need is an advisor who is willing to understand and facilitate the right actions/ decisions. Take an example of a client concerned about their increasing costs from archival/backup volumes. In this situation, resist the temptation to sell cloud object storage and ask the right questions - why are the backup volumes experiencing exponential growth, are the backup policies to be revisited (are full backups happening too often), are compression and dedup properly architected and applied, is the client keeping too many backup copies beyond compliance requirements? This may reduce the volumes/ revenues in your cloud but you will have a client who will appreciate you for doing what's right.

2) KISS principle: Cloud features and services on offer today have started mirroring what we had to contend with in 2000s with all the technology mergers and acquisitions. You could see competing solutions from a single technology supplier and multiple sales teams trying to sell you their slice of heaven. Fortunately, the advent of Cloud got most IT hardware suppliers to rethink their strategies and Hyper-converged environments were born. Perhaps a disruptive cloud firm looking to kill the cloud legacy offering (IaaS) is what it will take for cloud providers to simplify their offerings and reduce infrastructure complexities and feature overlaps. This will hopefully address Cloud sprawl which is a big issue most organizations face today.

3) Pricing as a Code: Cloud delivery stands out for its high degree of automated instrumentation and autonomous operations. One area that doesn't see this level of optimization is cloud pricing, which continues to be complicated, manual process? If we really believe in Customer First strategies, why not embed the cost components of compute, storage and egress as part of the workload principles so that clients continually get the benefits. Putting this in practice will ensure that archived storage not accessed for the last 365 days will be priced at the lowest price tier, compute instances that continue to persist beyond the initial allotted time will have discounts automatically applied, outbound bandwidth within the provider network will have no charges applied, IP address not attached to instances are automatically released and (not billed to client) and so on.

4) Cloud transparency: Cloud should not be sold as a magic pill that will automatically generate agility and cost benefits. Most production applications/ workloads in large enterprises are written for the underlying infrastructure and simply cannot exploit all cloud features unless they go through significant refactoring. Moving them as-is (termed as lift and shift) doesn't offer much beyond a new location for the workloads. The rise of hybrid cloud offerings from all providers especially in partnership with VMware is a testament to this dependency.

5) Cloud doesn't have to be zero sum game: For cloud to win, other deployments don't have to lose . For example, variable workloads are great in cloud but what about distributed transaction intensive workloads? Similarly, for a client considering Unified Communications, collaboration and conferencing works great in cloud but what about telephony? It is important to keep things objective when evaluating cloud or a cloud vendor. Also, to expand on an earlier point, Cloud is not the destination. All workloads are not meant for cloud. Don't have a Cloud Seller cap on every time you talk to your client.

6) Ethics and Trust matter: This is important. Your clients and partners are effectively handing over the keys to their digital assets. We should not compromise/ ruin this trust by creating a competitive offering for a partner provided capability (an example is Linkedin's own Kafka product) or worse, compete directly with your customer. We are seeing this concerning trend with one of the biggest cloud players and a growing number of clients and partners are deciding to terminate their relationships with this provider.

7) Don't repeat mistakes of the past: A big reason for cloud adoption was the desire to break away from technology and contractual dependencies. This was led by businesses looking to focus on their revenues and customers and not about the rigidity of their contracts with their IT providers. Unfortunately as cloud providers look to increase their market share and monopolize the market, we are seeing some of these old (wrong) practices being adopted. From Cloud providers binding Hybrid cloud capabilities to their own proprietary appliances to Cloud providers with product/ software departments limiting how these licenses may be used outside their own cloud to Customers being locked in to reserved (long term) instances in return for significant discounts (another word for financial engineering).

The points above are not meant to dissuade cloud adoption but to ensure better diligence. It is encouraging to see Cloud providers such as IBM and Google doing the right things for their clients. In the case of IBM Cloud, all inbound and outbound network within the IBM global private network is unlimited and not charged. Google, on their part, recently introduced a sustained use pricing model to provide discounts automatically based on usage. These two vendors are also promoting true Hybrid Cloud solutions that can work across any cloud and on-premise environments. Hopefully, this will lead to much needed introspection from all cloud providers.

Please comment on other areas that require re-prioritization so that we can be the best advisors and providers for our clients. Also, will keep updating this list as i learn and observe and challenge :-)

NOTE: ALL OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE ARE MY OWN AND DO NOT REPRESENT VIEWS OF MY CURRENT, EX OR FUTURE EMPLOYERS OR COLLEAGUES.