Why Every Enterprise Needs a Hybrid Cloud Governance Strategy

Over the past five years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with more than half a dozen Fortune 500 clients as well as several government agencies in various contexts. There is one thing that every one of these organizations had in common – all of them needed a Hybrid Cloud Governance Strategy and none of them had one. I’m sure that there are a few organizations out there that have tackled this already, but if there are, they’ve certainly jumped well ahead of the curve. Adoption of a Hybrid mix of Cloud and non-cloud capabilities has quite literally exploded in the past few years. There are few if any enterprises that haven’t already begun moving down that path. However, this is definitely a case where the technology trend is outpacing our ability to integrate it into business operations and processes (at least in a fairly well-defined or unified manner).

The time has definitely come where this is no longer a nice to have or something for trailblazers only. Today, every enterprise needs to tackle the challenge of immediate or near-term Hybrid capability management. And it might be better referred to that way because if we were only concerned about the Cloud portions of what the enterprise were managing, then we’d still only be dealing with a partial landscape. Here are a few reasons why you need it…

1 – Because piecemeal governance is ineffective. In order to meet service level expectations or objectives with clients, there has to be a comprehensive ability to manage all of the resources that support such a capability, regardless of how that capability may actually be distributed. Now, there may always be some dispute as to what exactly “management” represents given that some Cloud providers will give limited access or control rights to their infrastructure, which begs the question – can you manage something you don’t control? The answer to that is a yes, you can – but let’s specify what we’re referring to as management:

• You can manage access control from your user base to the capability
• You can manage capacity planning and execution
• You can manage upgrades, enhancements and expansion of the user base (in tandem with the provider/s)
• You can manage network security expectations (to and from your various capability elements)

You can manage integration between capability elements or between separate capabilities

2 – Because Holistic Governance has always been an area for improvement, now it is a necessity: Most organizations have had some challenges implementing or maintaining Governance processes (I discussed this recently in another post on Data Governance). What tends to happen more often than not is that an organization settles into one or two subsets of Governance, for example a focus on Data Governance or Portfolio Governance. But Governance can cut across everything, from SDLC to Security, to Architecture to ITIL – basically Governance could or should touch every core process in the enterprise. Dealing with new Hybrid Cloud capabilities presents an excellent opportunity to tackle an age old problem.

3 – Because where there is more complexity, there needs to be more cooperation to effectively coordinate: One major advantage of managing all of one’s own capability on premise is at least the potential that a single point contact or service provider may be available to help coordinate everything. With a Hybrid Enterprise, the number of diverse providers and teams may increase quite a bit. And while you won’t likely have a single POC anymore, you can mitigate that through implementation of a single process.

4 – Because this diversification of capability will likely continue for some time to come. The trend towards greater capability diversification is likely to accelerate quite a bit in the coming years. While there will be exceptions where some organizations will migrate all of their capability to one Cloud provider (like AWS), this will definitely not be the norm. We are going to retain some on premise capability for a long time, especially where mainframe technology is involved and there will be a wide variety of other SaaS players that will continue to pull the typical enterprise in multiple directions

So how can your organization get started with Hybrid Cloud Governance? Here are a couple of suggestions…

1 – Create a Capability Inventory (coordinate with provider inventory). This suggestion is generally a worthwhile exercise anyway, particularly as a planning or strategy aid. It is typically done up front and can be relatively quick. Capability can be viewed in multiple contexts, the two most common being; Business Capability and Technical Capability.

2 – Determine your metrics approach and standardize it across capabilities. This is sometimes tricky in that Cloud providers often have different types of SLAs and SLOs, but rather than trying to map to everyone else’s definitions, set up your own and map everyone’s to that.

3 – Dedicate a team to facilitate it. This doesn’t have to be big team, in some organizations it might even be one person. The important thing to keep in mind though is if you don’t have someone dedicated to cross the capability barriers, then things will likely remained stove-piped.

Copyright 2016, Stephen Lahanas

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10 Secrets of Cloud Architecture

Over the past year or so, the demand for Cloud Architecture has soared. This can be assessed simply by looking at requirements for full-time or contract positions related to Cloud Architecture. Even those IT Architecture roles not directly defined as being Cloud Architecture often now tend to include Cloud related qualifications. So, one has to wonder, why the recent upsurge in activity? And by the way, what does Cloud Architecture really represent these days? I'll try to answer this with a list of secret insights from an Architect on the front lines - and if not secrets - at least with unique perspectives:

Secret 1 - Cloud Architecture has morphed into a holistic field that encompasses not just AWS, Azure, Rackspace etc. features, but nearly all considerations faced by IT. It is now the new enterprise architecture - the traditional internal environment is just one of many which must be managed across a variety of barriers in a logically consistent manner.

Secret 2 - There is no such thing as a hybrid Cloud anymore. Nearly all IT environments have elements of internal and external cloud capability (e.g. any infrastructure group that uses virtualization can qualify, whether they have elastic computing or not. Also, most private Cloud frameworks are externally managed anyway). It is now simply a Cloud or Enterprise Framework.

Secret 3 - Cloud is not just Infrastructure. The days of thinking of Cloud as the IaaS or PaaS or even SaaS are mostly gone.  This has profound implications in regards to who should manage Cloud capability and how. To borrow a phrase from Data Architecture - Cloud capabilities represent "Enterprise Assets" and can no longer be managed in silos by individual IT service groups or business units.

Secret 4 - Yes, you need a Cloud Strategy. While it may sound obvious now, remarkably it hasn't been and still isn't in many quarters. This ties neatly with the enterprise data analogy but in reality also involves enterprise data, enterprise security an much more. I will talk more about Cloud Strategy in another post.

Secret 5 - The Cloud allows you to fail fast, take advantage of that. There are things that we can do with the Cloud at a fraction of the cost it would have taken to do even 5 years ago. The Cloud allows for much more rapid deployment and adjustment than traditional IT, but to take advantage of that, one has to acknowledge it in how new capability is approached. One way to do that, is to use part of your Cloud framework specifically to assess capability - an Innovation Lab of sorts. I will address this in a future post.

Secret 6 - The Cloud introduces new cost paradigms which need to be fully thought through in order to take advantage of. This is another good reason for the strategy. Not everything on the Cloud is cheaper, there needs to be serious consideration given on how to leverage existing licensing and equipment with oncoming Cloud capabilities.

Secret 7 - There will always be more than one Cloud to deal with. As great as AWS is in introducing more services than we ever thought possible, there will likely always be a legitimate need to include other Cloud offerings in your portfolio; whether it is Google, Azure or some SaaS solution or new capability that hasn't been released yet. And btw - there is no such thing as a Cloud portfolio - it's just your Portfolio - which from now on will include Cloud capability.

Secret 8 - To be a Cloud Architect, you in fact have to be an IT Architect. So, for example, if you want to be a good AWS Architect, you must understand; Networking technologies and concepts, Identity & Access Management, Devops, Server Management, Storage Management, Virtual Desktops and more. Specializing in AWS in fact makes one quite the generalist.

Secret 9 - To be a true Cloud Architect, one must have experience with multiple Cloud offerings. While the technologies and concepts are often similar, this extends the generalist notion even further.

Secret 10 - Cloud Architecture has infiltrated most other areas of architecture. Let's say you're an MDM architect looking to deploy Informatica, Infosphere, Stibo, Talend or some other MDM tool. In every case, there are now Cloud related aspects to the deployment options. Eventually every Architect will gain some Cloud familiarity whether they want to or not.

As I said, perhaps these insights aren't trade secrets, but taken together they represent an interesting new paradigm that not just architects have to contend with. Today's Cloud represents both a logical progression of key technologies as well as aggregation of those in new ways. The enterprise processes and practice to define, design and manage this new Cloud paradigm has somewhat lagged behind the capability. Cloud Architects will help lead the way in closing this gap.


copyright 2016, Stephen Lahanas

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