Key Takeaways

• “Allyship is the act of utilizing a position of privilege to take purposeful action, to speak up for and stand with those who are underrepresented or marginalized.”

• “People who have at least one ally in their workplace are twice as likely to be satisfied with their jobs.”

• “Create an allyship journey map that assists employees in navigating their own allyship journeys. The map outlines four stages that individuals typically go through on their path to becoming effective allies, including the actions of asking, listening, speaking up, and showing up.”

• “Create mechanisms that allow employees to gracefully recover from mistakes by implementing an allyship safety agreement. This agreement will assist employees in planning their actions for when they inevitably make errors.”

• The primary characteristics of an ally champion are:

• They are committed and make conscious choices that demonstrate the importance of this value as a leader, in a way that is visible to others. 

• They take affirmative action, intentionally including those with limited access. 

• They follow through to ensure that any unintended harm is acknowledged and repaired.

Key Takeaways

• “Migrating something to the cloud isn’t going to shave 50% off your costs simply by existing in a provider’s data center. You must invest time, effort and skills to ensure your cloud usage is efficient.”

• “Regardless of your organization’s drivers for cloud adoption, you need to evaluate and calculate cost upfront. Even if it’s just to make sure it wouldn’t be insanely more expensive than you anticipated, you still have to do this work.”

• “Don’t use cost as your biggest factor in cloud adoption, especially the reason to migrate. Make it a “nice-to-have” benefit alongside core drivers of agility, flexibility, innovation, etc.”

• “Don’t assume something will be cheaper or more expensive than your current solution. Do the hard work of calculating the total cost of ownership and return on investment.”

• “Evaluate over the long term, preferably five years. Qualitative benefits and quantified  return on investment are often not realized in the short term.”

• “Start to identify where you can realize some further savings. Build the foundation for your cost governance if you haven’t done so already.”

• “Prioritize investment on the most impactful activities, such as those with the highest savings. 80% of the savings are often achieved with only 20% of the time investment.”

Key Takeaways

• “Resilient applications must be both reliable and recoverable. However, the determination of how reliable and recoverable they should be should not be left to IT alone. It should be a business decision based on the needs of product owners and financial capabilities of business leaders.”

• “A risk-based approach requires a collective understanding of the risks linked to cloud failures among teams, to determine where to allocate time, effort, and resources in order to enhance resilience.”

• "The team should construct dependency graphs to assess the resilience of all cloud components utilized in the solution, rather than solely focusing on the server equivalents."

• “Organizations must embrace and limit the impact of cloud failures by prioritizing continuous availability, particularly for mission-critical applications.”

• “Applications should use stability design patterns to withstand temporary failures or performance degradations.”

• “Avoid added complexity and cost by taking advantage of the cloud provider’s native resilience capabilities, which can be used for both cloud-native and non-cloud-native applications.”

• The 9 principles for improving cloud resilience are:

1. Business Alignment

2. Balanced risk-based approach

3. Dependency mapping

4. Continuous availability

5. Resilient by design patterns

6. DR automation

7. Favoring cloud-native solutions

8. Establishing resilience standards

9. Business function focus

Learn more in the press release "Gartner Highlights 9 Principles to Improve Cloud Resilience."

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