The Path to Product Excellence: Avoiding Common Pitfalls and Enhancing Commun...
Creating a Cloud First Standard
1. Creating a Cloud 1st Standard
Ian Massingham, Technical Evangelist, AWS
@IanMmmm
2. What if you could devote 30% more of
your resources to your customers?
3. IT Map - Traditional IT
E-mail, Productivity,
Collaboration, HR,
Finance, ERP
Desktop Support, Device
Management, Telephony,
IT Support
Information Security, CISO
Encryption, Key Management, Identity
Management, Firewalls, IDS, DDoS
Business Applications
CTO/VP Applications
Digital Products, Brand
Websites, Mobile
Applications, Point of Sale
Systems, Commerce
Corporate Applications
CIO/VP Corp Systems
End User Computing
VP IT Support
Infrastructure, VP Infrastructure Servers, Storage, Networking, Databases,
Data Warehousing, Data Centers
4. IT Map - Traditional IT with AWS
Information Security, CISO
Corporate Applications
CIO/VP Corp Systems
End User Computing
VP IT Support
Infrastructure, VP Infrastructure
Business Applications
CTO/VP Applications
AWS Elastic Beanstalk,
AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS,
Amazon SNS, Amazon
Mobile Analytics, Amazon
CloudFront
Amazon WorkMail,
Amazon WorkDocs, AWS
Marketplace, AWS
Directory Service, SaaS
Amazon WorkSpaces,
Amazon AppStream, AWS
Marketplace, AWS Mobile
Services, SaaS
AWS Identity and Access Management
(IAM), AWS CloudHSM, AWS Key
Management Service (AWS KMS),
Security Groups, AWS Marketplace
Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon VPC,
Amazon Direct Connect, Directory Service, IAM, AWS
Service Catalog
11. Provide Executive Support
Path of least resistance
Don’t bet the farm
Deal with internal politics
Can start anywhere
CEO
12. Align on the Outcome
CEO
Competitive advantage
Save money
CIO
Business alignment
Move faster, more efficiency
CFO
Improved cash flow
Save money
CMO
Respond to market changes
More experimentation, better analytics
CISO Visibility, auditability, control
CRO
Get more products to market
Move faster, more efficiency
Priority AWS Value
Experience
Pace of Innovation
Service Depth & Breadth
Pricing Philosophy
Ecosystem
Global
13. Educate Staff Hybrid
Adoption
Cloud Center of
Excellence
Cloud-First
Standard
Engage Partners
Making it Real
Each journey is unique, but here’s what we see
along the way…
15. Educate Staff
Online videos
and labs
Instructor-led
courses
Business Stakeholders Technical Staff
Understand the efficiency,
agility, and innovation
opportunities of the cloud
Determine migration strategies
Design available and secure applications
Develop applications using scripts and SDKs
Scale and automate implementations
AWS Essentials -
Business & Technical
aws.amazon.com/training
19. Cloud Center of Excellence
Executive
Sponsorship
Experiment
Educate Staff
Making it Real
Each journey is unique, but here’s what we see
along the way…
20. Create a Center of Excellence
Cloud best practices
Customer Service Oriented
Automate everything
Enable
App
Teams
Infrastructure
Teams
Example tenets:
27. Forces for Architectural Change
High
Security
Systems,
Networks,
Apps,
and Data
DMZDMZ
User-Generated
Content
Cloud
Computing
Business
EcosystemsCustomer
Experience/
Identity
Devices/
BYOT
Predictability/
Understanding
Internet
of Things
SaaS
Open
Communities
Employees Suppliers
Partners Contractors
CUSTOMERS
CRM
HR
Services
Travel
&
Expenses
UX
28. Enterprise Transformational Services
28
DATA MESH
ENTERPRISE APPLICATION
INTEGRATION MESH
SECURITY SERVICES
CLOUDIFICATION
THROUGH MODERNIZATION
BUSINESS PROCESS
MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
SaaS DEPLOYMENT
Mainframe
Midrange
Custom Applications
Traditional
Applications
CSC IndustrySaaS
Solutions
SaaS-basedVertical
Applications
Pro-sumer Applications
System X
System Y
System Z
SaaS-basedHorizontal
Applications
aka:“As A Service” needs a new Platform
29. How we can help our clients to successfully deliver their Digital Transformation
30. Changing the Business Operating Model
End User
Pay-as-you-go chargeback
models, contestability across
cloud providers
Embedded in the process and
delivering defense in depth
True self-service experience
enable DevOps
Codify policies to govern,
automate, and “get out of way”
Costly, capital investments
Reliance on manual
approval model
Often inconsistent and
implemented manually
Brittle to change with
lack of standardization
Standardized, on-demand
platform and app blueprints
that are cloud portable
Manual provisioning
delays, manual
customization, Shadow IT
risks
Apps/Platforms
Security
Infrastructure
Governance
IT’s Role
IT perceived as a
resource gatekeeper
that
doesn’t innovate
IT becomes a service
broker and portfolio
manager
Traditional Model Cloud Empowered Enterprise
Good morning Seattle.
My name is < >, and I < > at AWS. We focus on how customers are integrating cloud into their business and how they put cloud services to use.
(CONT)
I’d like everyone to think about this for a moment.
Different applicability depending on role, but is often the key driver in what propels companies to broaden their adoption of cloud services.
I’d like everyone to keep this in mind as we move through this morning’s discussion. As it becomes clear how you’ll be able to realize this benefit, you need to think about how best allocate your resources back into your business.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, often talks about how in business it’s useful to think about the constants. Everyone talks a lot about the things that do change, like technology, but you don’t often hear the business community talk about the things that don't change. When you hear Jeff talk about some of the customer obsession philosophies that have helped make amazon.com successful, he’ll talk about how it’s impossible to imagine a future where our customers will want to pay more for their items. Or, that it’s impossible to imagine that customers will want their items delivered slower.
We think about this the same way at AWS. What are the chances that your customers come to you and ask that you spend more time building your infrastructure rather than what they pay you for? Or your CEO asking you to deliver features more slowly in favor of spending more time managing your data centers. It’s impossible to imagine a future where you’re having these kinds of conversations.
What I hope this picture illustrates is that AWS can help make your entire IT organization more effective. It means that you can start taking advantage of what cloud has to offer anywhere. It should be driven by the needs of your business at the time. Chances are that once you start to realize the benefits of cloud in one part of IT, you’ll be able to leverage that experience to more efficiently use it in other parts over time.
We’ve seen this happen across a wide variety of customers, many of whom have long standing legacy and mature IT organizations.
Every imaginable business segment is using AWS in a meaningful way.
Media: Dow Jones & News Corp - became cloud first and is migrating more than 50 data centers to the cloud.
Health Care: J&J - using WorkSpaces to enable tens of thousands of contractors to work in their environment without having to manage all the devices
Travel: Qantas is using AWS to dynamically compute flight routing and enhance their customer loyalty programs.
Science: The weather company is processing billions of weather events every day and supplying this data to millions of consumers around the world.
FinServ: SunCorp in Australia is using us in a big way to move all of their IT to the cloud.
This will be slightly different for every organization, but this is the trend we’re seeing in the organizations that are doing this well.
End user computing and corporate application need to rely less and less on infrastructure as the solutions powering the business are run in the cloud. This is allowing organizations to focus on optimizing the business processes that these functions serve and less on the infrastructure that supports it.
DevOps, or some other aptly named cloud center of excellence, emerges as a more cost effective and agile way to provide best practices, automation, and governance across all of IT.
CLICK…..This transition frees up precious resources to work on what matters to your customers - the applications that drive your business.
I’d once again encourage everyone to ask themselves - what would you do if you had more resources to devote to your business? What would this mean for your customers?
(CONT)
Getting there is a journey.
This is not something that’s going to happen overnight. It’s an iterative process that involves thinking about IT a bit differently, but one that will become easier as you make progress.
The destination - which is to divert more resources to your customers - will start to happen almost right away and pick up speed as you gain experience.
We’ve seen this journey take place many times now.
Through these experiences we’ve observed a common set of practices that each organization employs along their way. These best practices illustrate the handful of areas companies invest their energy in that allows them to get the most out of the cloud, which, in turn, allows them to devote more resources to their business.
They provide executive sponsorship - projects are more likely to succeed when the boss supports them
They provide opportunities for their staff to learn. Computer science fundamentals have not changed, but the way you deploy them has. Everyone who wants to learn can transfer their skills to the cloud and continue to be successful.
The cost of experimentation in the cloud pales in comparison to on-premises environments. You’ll be able to learn and get things done more quickly, and you’ll be more successful when you view your new initiatives as an experiment that will provide valuable insight into how the organization will progress.
This is where I see a lot of customers getting stuck. You’ll get to this point and you’ll begin to realize some of the benefits that cloud brings. To take it to the next level requires the organization to make an investment in itself.
CLICK…. Making it real is something that organization has to do while continuing to invest in each practice.
The ecosystem of system integrators, digital consultancies and IT vendors that are delivering cloud based solutions has evolved quite a bit in the last several years. Whether you’d like to work directly with a partner or indirectly through the AWS marketplace, there will be plenty of opportunities to accelerate your initiatives on the AWS platform.
They create a cloud center of excellence. We see a lot of customers creating DevOps organizations, but what you call this and where it sits in the organization is less important than it’s mission and the support it receives.
Most large organizations have existing IT investments that haven’t yet fulfilled their useful life. Setting up a hybrid architecture allows customers to take advantage of their existing assets while still benefiting from what the cloud has to offer.
Finally, when an organizations fully realizes the benefits that cloud platforms bring, they end up instituting a cloud first standard. This reverses the burden of proof from why cloud to why not cloud.
Let’s talk a bit about each of these.
First, let’s talk about exec sponsorship
Projects in big companies are far more likely to succeed when the boss supports them. You don’t need to bet the farm in the first few months, but you want to start with some things that are important enough to get the attention of the executive team. If you’re in a leadership or executive position, help the organization understand the long game and celebrate successes along the way.
Successful CIO use every opportunity to reinforce our cloud strategy - in executive meetings, during department town halls, on my blog, and any other outlet that presented itself. Making it clear to your teams why it’s important to the business will be key in winning everyone over.
If you’re not in a position to make the decision, help the executive team understand that they’ll be able to devote more resources to their business. Often times I’ve found it’s best to illustrate with a case study where you’ve done something successful on a small scale, and would be able to realize additional benefits through scaling it out.
Think about how you can appeal your stakeholders….<next>
Try to understand what motivates the executive team. This will be different in every company, though
Most CEO’s will want a competitive edge and look for ways to keep their resources focused on the business.
Most CIO’s want to be aligned to the business needs, and be able to move as quickly and efficiently as they can at scale
Most CFO’s want to save money. Not only can the cloud save you money, but it can help improve cash flows when you don’t have to make substantial capital investments for each projects or spend on costly refresh events.
Marketers want to be able to respond quickly to changing market conditions, quickly update their branded websites, and have access to better analytics. RedShift, AWS’s fastest growing service, has helped many of our customers greatly reduce the time and complexities associated with traditional data warehouses. Unilever’s marketing team is using AWS to host over 1,700 brand websites. They can’t understand how they ever lived without the ability to update them as quickly as they do today.
Security officers want greater visibility into the IT environment, and be able to have controls that they can broadly apply to the environment. Using CloudTrail, CloudWatch, AWS Config, and other services allow our customers to audit and alert on their entire environment with a simple API call.
You should be open minded about making an investment in your staff’s skills.
I sometimes hear that organizations don’t move ahead because they don’t feel like they have the skill sets. This is not the right way to look at it…
Anyone who is willing to learn can participate in moving your organization forward.
Basic computing fundamentals have not changes, they’ve only become more nimble and easier to innovate with.
Most companies I talk to that embrace the idea of giving their staff new skills move a lot faster, and in many cases have used their cloud strategy as a mechanism to retain and attract talent.
This chart illustrates the growing trend for job postings that list AWS somewhere in the job description. This is a great indicator for what the industry is after, and the further growth of the AWS platform.
It’s good for you as an employer to know that the investments you’ll make in your staff will continue to pay off, and as employees it’s good to know that the investment in your career will carry with you for many years to come.
Like all the practices of the journey, the more you invest in this area - or the more internal champions you build - the faster your journey will accelerate.
We offer a wide variety of training courses that are both self service and instructor led. On top of this we provide several certification programs that give your workforce the confidence and piece of mind that you’ll be utilizing well known best practices as you implement your systems.
We offer courses that not only go deep into the stack for your technologists, but also help the business understand the benefits of cloud computing, so that they can be your partners on your journey.
At Dow Jones we trained my entire staff with hands on training, and while we did hire many new people, much of what we accomplished was because the well tenured folks became willing to learn new skills to push their careers forward.
Start to look at each project as an experiment.
This is important in the beginning, but it’s also an opportunity to change the way you think about project portfolio management. Because the investment required to try new things becomes far less than if you had to procure, manage, and deploy infrastructure, it becomes much easier to begin projects.
Even if things that you experiment with don’t work out, you’re likely to build some expertise in the organization that you didn’t already have, which you’ll be able to parlay it into your next project.
As the cloud muscle memory in the organization grows, and you build off of each experiment, things will move a lot more quickly and it will be much easier to change directions.
We saw in the IT Map that AWS has services that fit into every part of IT. This means that you can start anywhere - I’d encourage you to look to experiment where you already need to make an investment.
May want to try an SAP implementation to compare the performance and do some cost modeling, may want to build a website or a mobile app, may want to try virtual desktops in the cloud to scale out your staff - the possibilities are endless.
And because all of our services are pay as you go, and many have free usage tiers, it’s very easy to do.
What’s important is that you view these experiments as an educational process that will allow you to focus more of your resources on experimenting rather than the undifferentiated heavy lifting traditionally required for IT projects. Your confidence will grow with each experiment, and you will find that you will be able to execute more quickly and cost effectively over time.
A lot of our customers leverage third parties to help them on their journey.
Sometimes this comes through pre-existing relationships, and sometimes our customers work with us to help them find new partners that will tailor to their new needs.
It’s my experience that there is a necessary friction between application and infrastructure teams. Often times this system of checks and balances is healthy, but sometimes it can become toxic.
Because the cloud takes away a lot of the heavy lifting, the lines between app and infrastructure teams can become even more blurred, and we find that customers who develop a cloud center of excellence to drive best practices and governance are often able to get more from their cloud investments than those who don’t.
DevOps is a common name, though having the group is more important than what you call it and where it reports. We have some customers who have one center of excellence for the entire company, and others who have one for each business unit. Whatever direction you head in, make sure there’s an opportunity to share the best practices across the whole organization.
Inventory of skills build, things will move a lot faster
At some point you’ll find that you need your cloud applications to communicate with the environment in your data center.
There’s a great opportunity for everyone here to continue to innovate in their business, and we welcome you to raise your profile by talking about it in the industry. If you have something that you’re proud of, let us know and we’d love to discover how we may be able to help you draw some attention to your accomplishments.
There’s a great opportunity for everyone here to continue to innovate in their business, and we welcome you to raise your profile by talking about it in the industry. If you have something that you’re proud of, let us know and we’d love to discover how we may be able to help you draw some attention to your accomplishments.