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19/9/2018 1 Comment Cloud Adoption Roadmap in 10 Steps Many CIO, CTO and business leaders are all working through their cloud strategies. Most large companies in Australia have adopted a hybrid cloud approach, using both private and public cloud services. In this blog, I'm wanted to outline 10 critical steps on how you can create a cloud adoption roadmap and then align this roadmap to your current execution path.  A cloud adoption roadmap is a really important tool, as it serves to visualise and communicate your plans to all key stakeholders in your organisation. The important part of the roadmap is to ensure you have a clear 1 page visual outlining the key milestones / decisions points, backed up by clear definitions behind the roadmap of what each component on the roadmap means. My suggestion is to use a modelling tool to create your roadmap and my top pick is the Abacus tool from Avolution. Before we delve any deeper into our cloud adoption roadmap, let's be clear on some basic terminology, to ensure we're all on the same page: Software as a Service (SaaS) These are services that end-users consume. Examples include: Social Media Tools, Salesforce, Office 365 and Xero. The apps that you download to your mobile phone are predominantly SaaS. Platform as a Service (PaaS) These are services that developers consume to create SaaS products. Examples include: Development Tools, Testing Tools and Datastores. Apps that you download to your PC or laptop at home to allow you to write code, test code and setup datastores in the cloud are all examples of PaaS. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) These are services that operations teams will build, test and commission to support developers, who consume PaaS and end-users, who consume SaaS on the PaaS, or SaaS via a 3rd party. IaaS can be virtual machines, networking or basic storage. If you're interested in digging deeper in cloud definitions, there is a simple whitepaper that the National Institute for Standards and Technology have produced. It covers everything in 3 pages: nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/legacy/sp/nistspecialpublication800-145.pdf I've also created a simple reference model below:  DevOps This is cultural change centred around ensuring that the developers (working on PaaS) are collaborating and communicating effectively with the operations teams (working on IaaS). This is important to create secure, reliable and engaging SaaS apps. Great video on DevOps from the DevOps Institute: devopsinstitute.com/certifications/devops-foundation/ Hybrid Cloud All organisations I have worked with in Australia, that have more than 100 employees will have a combination of private and public clouds in their environment. This is the definition of hybrid cloud. Probably 99% will have an on-premise (or 3rd party hosted) private cloud for Active Directory and using public cloud for Office 365 with Azure Active Directory. The 1% is a single instance of G Suite I have come across. Great video on hybrid cloud here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n5Le8aePB4  Now that we have defined these terms, we can take a look at our Cloud Adoption Roadmap and our 10 steps:
www.scaledagileframework.com/lean-ux/  If you're interested in learning more, I offer a range of Cloud, DevOps and Scaled Agile courses at ALC Training: Cloud Courses (Foundation to Advanced) www.alctraining.com.au/courses/cloud-computing/ DevOps (Foundation to Advanced) www.alctraining.com.au/courses/devops/ Scaled Agile www.alctraining.com.my/safe-scaled-agile-spc/ www.alctraining.com.au/course/leading-safe/ 
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Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe for short, is a large interactive knowledge-based of best practices, case studies, courses and toolkits. The patterns and resources are proven, backed up by numberous case studies. It is specifically designed to work for very small businesses, right through to multi-billion dollar corporate giants. How does it do that?  Well there are a number of components that allow the method to scale. This includes a list of the key principles, outlined above, but also used the concept of Agile Release Trains. These are teams of teams, containing all your resources, including suppliers and partners, that are co-ordinated through program increment (PI) planning. These planning sessions ensure all the trains are moving in the same direction and that all the work is decomposed into features and stories. This results in working code shortly after the first sprint. The framework itself comes in four flavours:
Essential SAFe  Portfolio SAFe  Large Solution SAFe  Full SAFe  Still not convinced.....well there are a wealth of case studies on the SAFe site: www.scaledagileframework.com/case-studies/ Below is are a few of my favourites:    Want to know more about how to use SAFe? Please check out my Leading SAFe 2 Day Course. Please let myself or ALC Training know when and where we can run this course for your organisation:  For the first time in 2018, it's become easier than ever to gauge the state of the cloud market. New data from the top cloud providers, mean we can really see who is dominating the landscape. In this blog, I've chosen to look at the total revenue as an indicator of success. Partly because it's easy to measure, but also because it given an indication of relative market opportunity and growth. This chart is taken from a great ZDNET article that was published earlier this year: www.zdnet.com/article/cloud-providers-ranking-2018-how-aws-microsoft-google-cloud-platform-ibm-cloud-oracle-alibaba-stack/  It clearly shows Microsoft as the dominant force, which I predicted would be the case back in 2016. My colleagues at DXC Technology will attest to that prediction. I think it's also a reflection on a number of compelling events that have materialised over the past few years:
 On the Amazon Web Services side, there is much progress and improvement especially in the area of new services. AWS are very good in the Serverless and PaaS spaces, adding a whole series of new innovations. These and exciting innovations were announced at the AWS ReInvent 2017 conference last year and include:
 Oracle are coming up fast, probably as a result of their push in the past 12-18 months. A rep at Oracle invited me to attend Oracle Cloud World, which introduced me to the maturity and sleek look of their latest cloud offerings. The pics below gives a quick overview of the Oracle Cloud offerings:    IBM is a little way behind the Top 2 leaders with their suite of cloud offerings. IBM Watson is probably the best known. I'm still waiting for IBM to approach me to, and invite me to their conference. Check out the screenshot below:  More information on IBM cloud services can be found here: www.ibm.com/services/cloud?lnk=hpmse_ts&lnk2=learn Alibaba are a definitely one to watch. My prediction, is that by 2020 Alibaba will be No. 3 by revenue and may well be looking to eat up AWS with a takeover strategy, to compete with Microsoft. Here is a quick overview of the predicted growth of Alibaba revenue vs AWS:  And here is a good article that articulates how large and dangerous Alibaba really is. I do apologise for all the popups, but the free content on the site IS worth the pain: www.cbinsights.com/research/amazon-alibaba-international-expansion/ The link below gives another perspective on the Microsoft / AWS revenue growth story, outlining some of the great customers stories to come out of the Azure platform. These include:
Finally if you feel you need some specialised training or business advice on AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM, Oracle or Cloud CyberSecurity, feel free to reach out to me or to ALC Training: www.alctraining.com.au/courses/cloud-computing/  #CloudComputing #Cloud #AWS #Amazon #Microsoft #Azure #Office365 #CyberSecurity #CCSP #Training #Coaching #AI
The European Union EU) adopted a new law in 2016. It affects every company with customers residing in the EU. It comes into force on 25th May 2018, which is just over a week away. It is called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR for short. But what does it mean, and should companies be worried?  Firstly it address a number of key areas around the privacy of data to EU citizens, in relation to the storage, processing and handling of personal data. Personal data includes data that can identify the individual directly. This can include the following:
I've simplified and summarised the key points of the GDPR legislation below:
 The overall effect is to provide improved protection for EU citizens and to unify the laws across the EU. This puts onus on those businesses, including the cloud providers to ensure that data is processed fairly and in accordance with the law. There are a number of sanctions that can be enforced, depending on the nature of the breach:
So what should companies do? Firstly they need to seek legal advice from an expert in European Union law to understand the potential impacts and next steps. Next steps are to perform an audit of their business processes and how they store data to understand their current state. Then they need to perform some analysis on the law, with their legal expert to interpret the law and create a series of overarching requirements. These requirements then need to be solidified into a series of solutions. Here is a great example of how market-leading SaaS cloud provider Xero, are approacing their GDPR obligations in relation to their financial accounting package:  It's so important in all this work to ensure that the IT, security, legal and business departments are all working together closely to work through the issues and implement the solutions. Want to know more about how you can secure your data and ensure you are following the latest best practices? Consider taking a Certified Cloud Security Professional certification, leading to an ISC2 examination. I'd be glad to coach you through your questions and help expand your knowledge of all things security: www.alctraining.com.au/course/ccsp-certified-cloud-security-professional/  |
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AuthorPaul Colmer is an AWS Senior Technical Trainer. Paul has an infectious passion for inspring others to learn and to applying disruptive thinking in an engaging and positive way. Archives
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