A colleague of mine recently – and half-jokingly – asked: Are cloud platforms the new ransomware?

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I’ve worked with IT since the mid-80s, always promoting change and progress toward new solutions and technologies. The advantage of so many years in the industry, as well as an occasional source of frustration, is the ability to see patterns in the adoption of new tech.

One positive pattern is organizations’ desire to put their suppliers under competitive pressure. A more double-edged sword is that often there’s a new generation in the company – eager to build careers on a new technology/solutions/platforms – that contrasts with the organization’s old guard of established players. This desire drives change, but when armed with a hammer, one tends to view every problem as a nail, leading to statements like “we have a Supplier X strategy”, or a “Cloud-based Y strategy”. These are surprisingly simplistic statements indicating how people forget the importance of competitive pressure.

Remember the browser war?

A lack of competition leads to stagnation. An example that people may still remember is the period  after the (first) web-browser war when Internet Explorer dominated and stagnated. How much, was made obvious when Google Chrome turned up and showed how fast and flexible a modern web browser could be.

The urge to obtain simplicity through similarity comes at a price – a loss of freedom of choice. I remember when people said they loved to use stored procedures in databases, until they realized they’d built themselves into a corner. When the database supplier increased its fees, they just had to grin and bear it. One possible consolation was that paying higher prices helped a lot of very sophisticated sailboats compete, round and round in circles…

Creating a genuinely effective IT strategy.

Here are some of my recommendations for establishing a true, supplier-dependent (or at least supplier-balanced) IT strategy: freedom of choice, nimbleness, diversity, and organizational change.

1. Choice and nimbleness
The strategy must include freedom of choice and agility. Organizations that are born in the cloud use modern solutions based primarily on open source, such as microservices, containers, Kubernetes, and OpenShift. They are well suited for the cloud, and its development and operational principles. (DevOps/DevSecOps), and most providers of cloud platforms offer to maintain a healthy level of competition. If necessary, these services can also work in private clouds or one’s own data center, for example, when security requirements demand it. Choosing proprietary solutions must be based on logical, well-considered reasons, and, preferably, these solutions should be isolated from the main code for easy replacement when better alternatives become available.

2. How and in what order?
Another strategy component is accepting that moving to the cloud will take time. Strategy in this case is very much about priorities. It’s about how, and in what order, you do things. Moving old applications from the data center to the cloud without reworking them has no advantages as such. It’s like cleaning by just moving stuff from your house to self storage units. You didn’t improve anything by trading housing costs for storage rental fees. Old furniture won’t magically become new in storage, and old applications will still be outdated in the cloud. When you look at examples, such as extreme scaling and, at the same time, “cheap” applications, they use the full complement of modern tools, DevOps, open-source code components, and more. Choosing which applications to modernize first, how large or business-critical they are, or if you move them yourself or through partners, depends on (among other things) your organization’s maturity level. Partners can also be important to take the load off of operations and maintenance functions by handling lower-priority items in your transformation journey.

3. Embrace diversity – even in the cloud
A third component: Embrace diversity – even in the cloud. Multi-cloud will be the norm for the majority going forward. In practice, no one will want to put all their cloud eggs in one basket. (I repeat, with the prerogative of the old, that suppliers who think they have no competition quickly become complacent, stupid, and slow.) In addition, mergers and acquisitions will create situations where multiple cloud suppliers deliver to a single organization. Indeed, one of the promises of the cloud is that different parts of a business will be able to use the right solution for their needs, and sometimes that solution is locked into a specific cloud supplier.

Some providers of cloud platforms dream of “pure” customers, sourcing only from them as a single supplier, but I believe that dream situation won’t last long. Just this past spring, we saw how a large Nordic organization pulled back from its initiative of “everything to one cloud provider”. Despite the supplier’s promises of a comprehensive service offering, in practice, the SAP installation was problematic and four times as expensive in the supplier’s cloud. This organization is now shifting to more of a mix, where one partner delivers with the help of multiple public clouds, private clouds, and classic sourcing, where ultimately the services and knowledge are the important factors for delivering value.

4. How do we work within the organization?
A fourth component is an organization and how well its working methods are suited to new ways of developing and operating one’s own solutions in the cloud. When a large, existing organization such as Santander decides to transform itself to take on hungry Fintech competitors, the company doesn’t start by trying to cram everything into the cloud. It starts by revamping the organization: How do we need to work, which tools and methods should we use to make the most of the cloud?

The cloud – or clouds – are a fantastic opportunity. Using them wisely requires a good strategy, hard work, and long-game thinking. It is important to ignore the dulcit tones of the Pied Piper. Even if it may seem like an attractive option, it’s hardly responsible to say: “I know we’re thinking short-term and building ourselves into a corner, but that’s my successor’s problem…”

“How We Do Things Here” manual

So, are cloud platforms really ransomware? Only if we allow the cloud platforms to be. The power is still in the hands of IT, who can use good strategies and hard work to avoid putting themselves or their successors into the bear trap where the only way out is to pay up and look happy…

A good complement to an IT strategy, especially for those who’ve seen too many strategies forgotten in binders on a shelf, is a playbook – a “How We Do Things Here” manual, preferably with examples all the way down to code-snippet level. The steps to develop a “Cloud Playbook” and the effects of the cloud on all levels of an IT organization are well described in “The Cloud Adoption Playbook“. This book also discusses the topic of security, which is, of course, an essential part of any IT strategy.

If you want to expand your strategy with tactical and technical aspects, it might be well worth your while visiting IBM’s Think Digital Summit Nordic event on October 7, 2020:

>>Read more about Think Digital Summit Nordic<<

Do you have any questions or inquiries regarding your opportunities with cloud (platforms)? Then please do not hesitate to contact me at mikael.haglund@se.ibm.com