We often hear “We want to achieve Cloud Speed” when we talk about deployment and management of Public Cloud. What does that mean? A VM can be deployed in few minutes in Public Cloud so the question is “why do you take longer time to start managing that?”. It is an interesting question, isn’t it? How many of you deals with such questions on daily basis. As far as I understand, it isn’t easy task for any company or service provider achieve it and sustain that. It require lot of preparation to gain that speed. Because, it is not a just about deployment but also taking care many things starting from monitoring, management, security, billing etc.
Let’s take look at some of the key areas we need to focus. Vrooooomm……
Automation – It is the key for any organization to build automation and also make it reusable. In order to make a deployment with single click, you need to invest days, weeks and months in the background. What is important is, we make it re-usable and generic where possible. So that it can be used for other clients with minimal efforts.
Security – This would be an interesting area where you need to negotiate hard with CloudSpeed because you cannot compromise the security which is the a key pillar of your design. At the same, we need to make sure that it does not stall too much. It becomes more challenging when security organizations view public cloud with on-premise approaches. This does not work and bring lot of other dependencies and create other single point of failures. Every organization need to take careful approach to bring their security organizations to think Cloud native approaches and doing it in a Cloud way.
Resources – Organizations need to invest heavily on this area to ensure that the resources are skilled enough to respond to a demand quickly when provider like Azure, AWS, GCP and Oracle releases new services and ready to support from day 1. I don’ think it is an easy task but it is not impossible. Investing on resources and let them work closely with Public Cloud provider focusing on certain areas. This will help team to build the Center Of Excellence team organically within them. Work closely with Public Cloud Providers and encourage resources to work with them even when there is Private Preview of a new service. This will ensure that you have a pools of skilled resources to help the customer when a new service is released.
Integration of tools – In order monitor, manage and respond to issues, we need to invest on engineering of integrating these tools. The success of the service companies depend on how soon they can respond to support demands from the client. So we must carefully choose these tools to ensure that you can do more of plug and play.
Multifaceted Support model – In order to catch the speed of the public cloud, we need to have multiple approaches to meet the customer requirements. This can be in a phased manner like starting with minimal and grow full fledged support over the time for a new service.
Collaboration of teams: Public Cloud is a platform to run variety of workloads. You need to establish the internal partnerships with different teams like application, databases, security etc to be able handle the support demands. Avoiding these teams working in isolation is key for the success and encourage collaboration and create internal more partnerships to win together.
Roadmap: A committed, customer focused and demand based roadmap is required to help getting new business and also help the delivery organizations to respond effectively to high demand to support a service.
Billing model: It is difficult to have a single billing model to support every resources in a subscription/account of a given Public Cloud provider. So we need to have flexible, easily adoptable model to cater such challenges and bill the client effectively and appropriately.
The above points are not exhaustive list but some of the key points I think that we should remember when we want to achieve fast adoption in Public Cloud. So, we must work towards creating a platform to accelerate the Public Cloud journey to be more successful with require SPEED.
Please provide your feedback if you have any suggestions.
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