By Allan Brearley, cloud practice lead at IT services consultancy ECS
While public cloud is on every large financial services firm’s digital agenda, the journey to the cloud is likely to be littered with the digital equivalent of space debris. Bump into one and those cloud rollouts could be delayed or worse. Swerving this digital debris requires a considered approach.
Understandably, though, the rising tide of digital disruptors lapping at the big players’ feet and threating customer leakage makes it hugely tempting to go full throttle into the cloud from day one. Like a child in a sweet shop, the sheer accessibility and ease of consumption of cloud services can make it difficult to resist a pick and mix-fuelled feeding frenzy.
But resistance is vital. Successful commercial innovators such as Elon Musk and Steve Jobs have shown time and again that the “start small,
think big, learn fast” ethos works. The starting point is to scope out a grand plan or vision for the project – and resist the lure of that seemingly innocuous bag of sweets.
Take Musk’s grand vision for a reusable rocket booster that would transform the near and deep space industry. In mid-November 2018, SpaceX launched the latest in a series of used Falcon 9 rockets – and once again successfully landed it after lift-off on one of its drone ships. Musk succeeds because he expounds the need to focus on evidence-based decision making. While thinking big about rocket innovation, he committed to three attempts, setting strict boundaries and budgets for each phase. This meant he didn’t waste cash or resources on something that wouldn’t work.
While Musk’s idea of a ‘think big, start small’ project is literally and figuratively out of this world, the good news is that the same approach works just as well for cloud-based transformation projects.
For finserv organisations not born in the cloud, the decision to bring cloud into the mix throws up some tough questions and challenges. As well as technical considerations, there are other hoops to jump through: from cost, risk, compliance, and regulatory oversight, to ensuring you have suitably qualified people.
Prepare for the mission ahead
It is quite common for highly regulated businesses with complex estates to enter a state of analysis paralysis at the early stages of a cloud transformation due to the sheer scale and difficulty of the task ahead. Instead of pausing and getting agreement on a “start small” strategy that supports the grand plan, they feel compelled to bite off more than they can chew.
It is easy at this point to switch into overdrive to try to establish the business case, scope the project, and formulate the approach in one go. But this approach is likely to fail because it is simply too hard to do it all in one go. Planning and building a cloud platform that will be capable of accepting every flavour of application, security posture and workload type is a complex undertaking that benefits from a piecemeal approach tied back to the agreed vision.
Get everyone on board
As with any major transformation project, the cultural and organisational changes required are not insignificant. Getting your priorities straight from the start – and straightening out your people, process, and technology issues – is critical. This involves getting closer to your business teams, being champions for change, up-skilling your workforce and quite possibly engaging a forward-thinking partner to help co-deliver the pilot cloud project.
The cultural shift required should not be underestimated. It’s important to consider up front how the operating model will adapt and what impact this will have across the business. Leadership needs to plan the shift from a traditional waterfall, left-to-right model to a more agile organisation capable of moving at pace and using new tools and methodologies such as DevOps that will help the business to fully exploit a cloud environment. And to do this while also ensuring the correct controls are in place for compliance purposes.
Some argue that these controls inhibit innovation and agility, but this need not be the case. Having the right controls embedded in the right places, and using automation and self-service to allow the development community to consume pre-rolled, well defined (and safe) cloud environments, makes it possible to land in the sweet spot of agility, innovation, speed and control.
Cloud also ushers in a new way of working that cuts swathes through enterprises’ traditional set-up of infrastructure teams specialising in compute, network, and storage etc. Care must be taken to ensure these individuals are fully engaged, supported, trained and incentivised to ensure a successful outcome.
Identify your pilot mission
Starting with a small pathfinder project is a good strategy and lets you lay the foundations for the accelerated adoption of cloud downstream, as well as for migration at scale – assuming this is the long-term objective. Suitable pathfinder candidates might be an application currently hosted on premise that can be migrated to the cloud, or a new application/service that is being developed in-house to run in the cloud from day one.
Assemble your test team
Once the pathfinder project is agreed upon, assemble a dream team of experts to deliver a Minimum Viable Cloud (MVC) capability that can support the activity. This team will also establish the core of your fledgling cloud Centre of Excellence (CoE). Once built, the MVC can be extended to support more complex and demanding applications that require more robust security measures.
Clock up some successful landings
The CoE team will be responsible for demonstrating success early on with a few comfortable wins, as well as for supporting the construction of the business case for a larger migration. This includes assessing suitable application migration candidates, and grouping them together into virtual buckets based on their suitability for cloud. This then makes it easier to determine the best migration strategy down the line.
Starting the engines for broader cloud adoption
These quick wins will help to convert any cynics and secure stakeholder buy-in across the business ahead of a broader cloud adoption exercise. They are also a powerful way to get infrastructure teams on side as they open up opportunities for re-skilling and fresh career opportunities too.
Put a ding in the universe
In summary, taking a scientific approach to your cloud journey and thinking big while moving things forward in small increments will help enable, de-risk and ultimately accelerate a successful mass migration.
But don’t just take my word for it. The late great Steve Jobs once said: “Start small, think big. Don’t worry about too many things at once. Take a handful of simple things to begin with, and then progress to more complex ones. Think about not just tomorrow, but the future. Put a ding in the universe.” I couldn’t have put it better myself.
