It was an exhilarating experience at AWS invent, from learning about all the innovations by Amazon Web Services (AWS) through various sessions and discussing cloud monitoring and management challenges with hundreds of attendees at our booth. There has been a lot of coverage about “what” the AWS team had announced and the respective benefits.
But what are the key broader action items that you can take from the show?
Here are three of them:
Innovate first with the cloud to win:
Cloud promises more agility and operational efficiency than traditional IT. No wonder all the upcoming and disruptive startups are mostly based on the cloud. We saw several companies such as Twilio and Workday highlight how AWS enables their business to be disruptive. If you are trying to adopt the cloud in your enterprise, first identify new product or services as the initial candidates for the cloud. The new “project” is more likely to be a success since there are no risks associated with migration and the agility of the cloud would make it more likely to succeed. Getting a big win under your belt will make it easier for you to convince rest of the organization to use the cloud.
Break barriers to cloud adoption through a holistic hybrid management approach:
Once you have demonstrated success of cloud with your new project(s), you need to develop a holistic hybrid cloud and IT management approach. Let’s admit it, traditional IT is going to be around for some time. The better your cloud services can integrate and work seamlessly with your on premise resources or technologies, the easier would be cloud adoption. AWS recent partnerships with VMWare highlights how traditional vendors are working to make this happen. A hybrid approach can also help with the migration of additional resource to the cloud as you have end to end visibility and control to make the transition smoother.
Leverage end to end analytics to drive superior customer experience:
Customers and internal users today demand a relentless experience. They really don’t care about the hybrid, complex infrastructures that IT teams have to deal with. Andy Jassy talked about IT having “X-Ray vision” (AKA Analytics) as a necessity for understanding your customer needs. These analytics not only should span your cloud but also traditional infrastructure, providing insights across your entire application and infrastructure stack so you can proactively optimize experience to delight your customers.
How are you going about ensuring the successful adoption of cloud in your organization? Thoughts on using the above three strategies? Anything else I am missing?
By Umair Khan
