Andrew Sharp

Research Director

Infrastructure & Operations Practice

It’s “day two” in the cloud. Now what?

Just because you’re in the cloud doesn’t mean everyone is on the same page about how cloud operations work – or should work.

You have an opportunity to implement new ways of working. But if people can’t see the bigger picture – the organizing framework of your cloud operations – it will be harder to get buy-in to realize value from your cloud services.

Use Info-Tech’s methodology to build out and visualize a cloud operations organizing framework that defines cloud work and aligns it to the right areas.

Nabeel Sherif

Principal Research Director

Infrastructure & Operations Practice

Emily Sugerman

Research Analyst

Infrastructure & Operations Practice

Scott Young

Principal Research Director

Infrastructure & Operations Practice

Widespread cloud adoption has created new opportunities and challenges:

• Traditional IT capabilities, activities, organizational structures, and culture need to adjust to leverage the value of cloud, optimize spend, and manage risk.
• Different stakeholders across previously separate teams rely on one another more than ever, but rules of engagement do not yet exist, leading to a lack of direction, employee frustration, missed work, inefficiency, and unacceptable risk.

• Many organizations have bought their way into a SaaS portfolio. Now, as key applications leave their network, I&O leaders still have accountability for these apps, but little visibility and control over them.
• Few organizations are, or will ever be, cloud only. Your operations will be both on-prem and in-cloud for the foreseeable future and you must be able to accommodate both.
• Traditional infrastructure siloes no longer work for cloud operations, but key stakeholders are wary of significant change.

Clearly communicate the need for operations changes:

• Identify current challenges with cloud operations. Assess your readiness and fit for new ways of working involved in cloud operations: DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering, and more.
• Use Info-Tech’s templates to design a cloud operations organizing framework. Define cloud work, and align work to the right work areas.
• Communicate the design. Gain buy-in from your key stakeholders for the considerable organizational change management required to achieve durable change.

Assess your key workflows’ maturity for “life in the cloud,” related to Key Operational Pillars. Evaluate your readiness and need for new ways of working.

Identify the work that must be done to deliver value in cloud services.

Define key cloud work areas, the work they do, and how they should share information and interact.

Outline the change you recommend to a range of stakeholders. Gain buy-in for the plan.

Cloud Maturity Assessment

Assess the intensity and cloud maturity of your IT operations for each of the key cloud workstreams: Consume, Host, and Build

Communication Plan

Identify stakeholders, what’s in it for them, what the impact will be, and how you will communicate over the course of the change.

Cloud Operations Design Sketchbook

Capture the diagram as you build it.

Roadmap Tool

Build a roadmap to put the design into action.

Phase 1: Establish Context

1.1: Identify challenges, opportunities, and cloud maturity

1.2: Evaluate new ways of working

1.3: Define cloud work

Phase 2: Design the organization and communicate changes

2.1: Design a draft cloud operations diagram

2.2: Communicate changes

Outputs

Cloud Services Objectives and Obstacles

Cloud Operations Workflow Diagrams

Cloud Maturity Assessment

Draft Cloud Operations Diagram

Communication Plan

Roadmap Tool

Cloud Operations Organizing Framework

• Define the work required to effectively deliver cloud services to deliver business value.
• Define key roles for operating cloud services.
• Outline an operations diagram that visually communicates what key work areas do and how they interact.
• Communicate needed changes to key stakeholders.

• Receive more value from cloud services when the organization is structured to deliver value including:
  • Avoiding cost overruns
  • Securing services
  • Providing faster, more effective delivery
  • Increasing predictability
  • Reducing error rates

Streamline Responsibilities

The operations team is spending too much time fighting applications fires, which is distracting it from needed platform improvements.

• Identify shared and separate responsibilities for development and platform operations teams.
• Focus the operations team on securing and automating cloud platform(s).

• Reduce time wasted on back and forth between development and operations teams (20 hrs. per employee per year x 50 staff = 1000 hrs.).
• Deliver automation features that reduces development lead time by one hour per sprint (40 devs x 20 sprints per yr. x 1 hr. = 800 hrs.).

Improve Cost Visibility

The teams responsible for cost management today don’t have the authority, visibility, or time to effectively find wasted spend.

The teams responsible for cost management today don’t have the authority, visibility, or time to effectively find wasted spend.

• Ensure operations contributes to visibility and execution of cost governance.

• $1,000,000 annual spend on cloud services.
• Of this, assume 32% is wasted spend ($320k).1
• New cost management function has a target to cut waste by half next year saving ~$160k.
• Cost visibility and capture metrics (e.g. accurate tagging metrics, right-sizing execution).

It is difficult to get or maintain buy-in for changes to operations without everyone on the same page about the basic value proposition cloud offers your organization.

Do the workload and risk analysis to create a defensible cloud vision statement that boils down into a single statement: “This is how we want to use the cloud.”

Once you have your basic cloud vision, take the next step by documenting a cloud strategy.

Establish your steering committee with stakeholders from IT, business, and leadership to work through the essential decisions around vision and alignment, people, governance, and technology.

Your cloud operations design should align to a cloud strategy document that provides guidelines on establishing a cloud council, preparing staff for changing skills, mitigating risks through proper governance, and setting a direction for migration, provisioning, and monitoring decisions.

Focus on the future, not the present

Define your target cloud operations state first, then plan how to get there. If you begin by trying to reconstruct on-prem operations in the cloud, you will build an operations model that is the worst of both worlds.

Responsibilities change in the cloud

Understand what you mean by cloud work

Focus where it matters

Cloud is a different way of consuming IT resources and applications and it requires a different operational approach than traditional IT.

In most cases, cloud operations involves less direct execution and more service validation and monitoring

Work that is invisible to the customer can still be essential to delivering customer value. A lot of operations work is invisible to your organization’s customers but is required to deliver stability, security, efficiency, and more.

Cloud work is not just applications that have been approved by IT. Consider how unsanctioned software purchased by the business will be integrated and managed.

Start by designing operations around the main workflow you have for cloud services. If you mostly build or host in the cloud, build the diagram to maximize value for that workflow.

Design principles will often change over time as the organization’s strategy evolves.

Identify skills requirements and gaps as early as possible to avoid skills gaps later. Whether you plan to acquire skills via training or cross-training, hiring, contracting, or outsourcing, effectively building skills takes time.

Call #1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges

Calls #2&3: Assess cloud maturity and drivers for org. redesign

Call #4: Review cloud objectives and obstacles

Call #5: Evaluate new ways of working and identify cloud work

Calls #6&7: Create your Cloud Operations diagram

Call #8: Create your communication plan and build roadmap

Establish Context

Design the Organization and Communicate Changes

Next Steps and
Wrap-Up (offsite)

1.1 Assess current cloud maturity and areas in need of improvement

1.2 Identify the drivers for organizational redesign

1.3 Review cloud objectives and obstacles

1.4 Develop organization design principles

2.1 Evaluate new ways of working

2.2 Develop a workstream target statement

2.3 Identify cloud work

3.1 Design a future-state cloud operations diagram

3.2 Create a current state cloud operations diagram

3.3 Define success indicators

4.1 Create a roadmap

4.2 Create a communication plan

5.1 Complete in-progress deliverables from previous four days.

5.2 Set up review time for workshop deliverables and to discuss next steps.

1. Cloud Maturity Assessment
2. Cloud Challenges and Objectives

1. Workstream target statement
2. Cloud Operations Workflow Diagrams

1. Future and current state cloud operations diagrams

1. Roadmap
2. Communication Plan

Cloud Operations Organizing Framework.

1.1 Establish operating model design principals by identifying goals & challenges, workstreams, and cloud maturity

1.2 Evaluate new ways of working

1.3 Identify cloud work

2.1 Draft an operating model

2.2 Communicate proposed changes

This should be a group with insight into current cloud challenges, and with the authority to drive change. This group is the main audience for the activities in this blueprint.

Review your established planning work and documentation.

Create a repository to house your notes and any work in progress.