The Today of Cloud

In a recent discussion with a forward looking CIO, they remarked how

the Cloud of past should not dictate the Cloud of tomorrow

Their contemporary outlook got me reflecting on how the Cloud market has evolved from its adoption days of past to innovation days of today.

For executives, Cloud continues to remain imperative. At the grass-root level, talent is excited to be with this technology. The challenge now, is more commonplace in the middle, for these two ends to converge, as seamlessly as possible.

The enterprise demands have progressed to -

• Growth
• Insight and Foresight
• OCM or Organization Change Management

Growth - Cloud as a revenue play instead of a cost play

Instead of thinking in terms of TCO, enterprises must view Cloud in terms of total bottom line impact, i.e. reduction of total cost of ownership savings, and also total growth potential. The approach should be to shift Cloud investments beyond the Data Center, for example, cloud native applications, DevOps deployment automation, public APIs et al may offer further returns in terms of newer avenues of revenue in addition to operational cost savings.

Insight, and Foresight - tomorrow has already begun today

1. Whether one chooses to go with a direct partnership or an indirect one, it has to be someone's focus area to manoeuvre the hyper-scaler relationship towards a win-win. The simplest example of this is the several benefits that Hyperscalers offer such as time bound discounts, innovation hours, certification vouchers that may be falling through the cracks just because it is no one's job to catch them.
2. Since Cloud as a technology is evolving at a higher pace, there is a need to anticipate and address challenges ahead of time - whether the strategy needs a revision, are the metrics from few years go still helping, where and how till the talent come from - a consistent tab needs to be kept on where the Cloud is now trending towards.

OCM - Cloud ownership cannot be only in Enterprise IT

A Cloud enabled organization of tomorrow needs roles across functions to be re-thought.

1. Does the Business finance understand the Cloud billing cycles?
2. Is Procurement able to assess the probable Cloud costs incurred for the services, products in their portfolio, and that the cost granularity varies per service?
3. Has Talent management mapped the learning paths for these different personas?
4. Has HR rolled out appropriate KRAs for these new Cloud roles?
5. Are Product, Service owners armed to make use of all features of their used Cloud services, and have created a future roadmap of their portfolio?
6. Have the business owners deep dived into which Cloud services can help them maximize revenue? And which service from which hyper-scaler suits their ecosystem best?

To conclude, the tide of a Cloud CoE is passé. In the today of Cloud, everyone is onboard.