Operations and governance (cloud operating model)

Many organizations start by taking a traditional project-based approach adding cloud as an additional technology layer into their existing operating model and landscape. While they may start to realize value and savings from reduced infrastructure spend over traditional and legacy on premise approaches, adding yet another technology into the mix does bring in challenges. It can mean they are unable to adopt and support new business initiatives at a pace demanded by the business. It is not until one or more events and issues arise that many IT leaders are forced into acting and doing something different.

Establishing an appropriate cloud operating model is critical to forming your organization’s successful adoption of cloud and delivering greater business agility. The impact of the cloud will be felt across your entire organization (not just information technology) and will significantly affect, and be affected by, your organizational culture and Information technology delivery structures. Understanding these implications and your company's desire to change are important elements of building a successful cloud operating model.

Unlike some of the more technical domains, building out and establishing a cloud operating model is more fluid in terms of prescriptive outcomes. Our experience in working with successful cloud Technology Leaders (CIO/CTO) is that they look to establish a capability that is value generating before they are faced with failures and firefighting.

Examples of value generation seen by some AWS adopters include:

• 60% reduction in downtime

• 51% efficiency savings

• 14x reduction in time to deliver

• 43% reduction in operational costs

Unfortunately, there is often a sole focus on the technology of cloud and it is not until issues arise that that many IT leaders are forced into acting and doing something different.

A successful cloud operating model (COM) enables organizations to operate applications reliably and securely in the cloud with a faster pace of innovation and value to the business. A key component of leading COM approaches is the adoption of a Product based approach of the cloud platform. By adopting a product mindset, each team can take the responsibility and accountability for increased awareness, ownership and operational excellence through self-healing systems that can recover quickly using integrated failure detection and remediation.

A number of key activities can facilitate, support, and even accelerate the achievement of cloud adoption and delivery of business outcomes. Enterprises usually have a multitude of competing priorities, even within their cloud strategy. Failure to transform operating models can result in a great stall phenomenon where adoption momentum stops or slows to a crawl. One of the key factors observed in those customers who have avoided this effect has been the successful establishment of a cloud delivery and governance function, often referred to as a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE).

There are six steps that companies should follow to build out a successful CCOE:

1. Work backwards from the customer

2. Re-envision the world as products

3. Organize teams around products

4. Bring the work to the team

5. Reduce risk through iteration

6. Own your entire lifecycle

Platform optimization can be added through the measurement of known application baselines and testing those baselines using chaos engineering (failure injection) and game days (interactive team-based hands-on learning exercise). Achieving these recommendations most likely needs a culture shift around how organizations design, deploy, and operate their cloud platform and a focus on automation with repeatable, ongoing processes.

To set the stage for transformation, organizations need to move towards iterative and incremental operating model improvements and a product-based mindset to IT delivery. This section covered best practices for establishing a cloud operating model, including:

• Start small, but keep the end in mind.

• Strive to define a future state model that the cloud affords, and aligns to outcomes that are core to your business.

• Be intentional about how you drive change and bring people along on the journey, and do so via iterative continuous improvements, cross-functional teams and experimentation.

• Pilot what success looks like by establishing an initial cloud foundation team, identifying several candidate workloads to run on AWS, tracking clearly defined metrics, creating opportunities for continuous learning, and celebrating early wins.

By following these guidelines, you can set a foundation that can be emulated and scaled to other parts of the organization.