I deal with a lot of customers for whom, (unsurprisingly), cloud is very much on the agenda.  However the challenge almost invariably is how they make this happen in reality.

 

One customer had the intention to move 15% of all enterprise workloads into the cloud within a year, but halfway through the year, they had not really made much progress.  The reason being that when it came down to the detail, everyone agreed in principle that it was a good thing, but that their individual needs for their platform/application was an exception to the enterprise strategy.  The net result was the IT landscape became comprised of nearly all “exceptions”.  In contrast, I was dealing with another company where the CEO was personally involved in the discussion.  With the CEO involved, it was frankly astonishing to see how fast a number of blockers disappeared.

 

This is why I always say that the cultural readiness is the first and largest sine qua non with respect to moving to the cloud.  Without that readiness, then the true committment will not exist to push through the changes.   A company will either make a decision to do something and commit behind it, or it will not.  Technical product comparisons and business case analyses do not create committment, they merely support a committment already made, and they certainly will not overturn an unsupportive culture.

 

My next post will talk about how a customer who is ticking the “go to cloud provision” committment can actually set in place the framework to do so.