Cloud

How is your organization approaching cloud security? Find peer benchmarks in this high-level survey overview.

Top Answer: Without a doubt - Technical Debt! It's a ball and chain that creates an ever increasing drag on any organization, stifles innovation, and prevents transformation.

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Top Answer: In terms of cloud programs, what I foresee will happen is that instead of migrating and transforming to move to the cloud, you may do a lift and shift first before you transform. That will become both much faster and simpler. Then you can create cloud-native applications, or greenfield applications directly in the cloud. Then you will continue to evolve those applications through new functions.

This survey focuses on the pain points driving the decisions for Cloud Infrastructure and the overall approach towards it.

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Top Answer: OpenRPA

Top Answer: When we adopt cloud in silos it hampers the potential for success because it’s like putting a bandaid over a wound. We may be just doing cloud transformation for the customer-facing side, but our back office still continues to work on monolithic legacy systems. So even though we may become composable or agile on the front end, we are still very monolithic and rigid on the back end. The concept of a composable enterprise enables you to become much more agile, but agility is not speed. Agility is speed to change, irrespective of whether you are only doing cloud on the front end, or if you're doing an end-to-end cloud transformation. When you look at it from the perspective of a CEO or CxO, those roles are not going to reap the true benefits of that. That's why cloud has become more of a board discussion nowadays, rather than a topic for the CTO or VP of Engineering.

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Top Answer: I talk about three horizons of cloud and most of the cloud providers, like Microsoft and Amazon, are working in the same direction. The first horizon is where you focus mostly on infrastructure or cost. You reduce the cost of resources you consume to run any application when you move to cloud, and you also reduce the efforts associated with managing it. It’s primarily a lift and shift or rehosting kind of activity that gives you an immediate ROI. You can take it to the CFO and they will approve the business case. Horizon two is where you move towards becoming a cloud-native enterprise. In a cloud-native enterprise, the ultimate objective is making it easy to create, deploy, secure, manage and consume products and services for your employees, customers and partners. Then you're connecting the complete business value to that particular case. I don’t talk about the 12 factors, which most technologists focus on; I don't even talk about cloud functions like S3 buckets, EC tools instances or databases. Horizon three is changing the enterprise. That means adopting what I refer to as industry cloud. For example, if a healthcare provider wants to launch major telemedicine initiatives, how can they use that cloud? That industry cloud is the point at which you can link innovation to business value today.

What's the business case for SD-WAN? What do digital leaders want to see from vendors?

Top Answer: I was instrumental in building the cloud practice at my organization. But many organizations aren’t doing cloud transformation; they’re doing cloud migration or cloud enablement in different silos. It's not happening across the enterprise to enable full digital transformation.  Another pitfall is that most cloud projects are considered technology projects, rather than business projects. Most are hopping onto the cloud bandwagon not only to associate themselves with the latest technology, but also for cost benefit. They are not associating it with the larger potential for business value, such as increasing the company’s innovation capacity, entering new markets or reducing the time to launch a new product.  And the third pitfall is something that has become very prominent. A lot of people are following the cloud-first approach, which is good because it will be further enhanced. But people are working on large-scale, high-investment transformation programs that take years, without defining the future state and creating a roadmap to achieve that future state. I'm calling it “future state” rather than “target state” because it's ever-evolving with the advent of new technologies and new business models. Most organizations are making large-scale investments and want to do a large-scale transformation in one go. They're trying to include too many things in one transformation program. That's okay if you define some low-hanging fruit as your milestones, but that makes executing those programs much more complex.

Top Answer: Consider implementing a Cloud access security brokers (CASB) tool which will  provide visibility, compliance, data security, and threat protection for any cloud-based service being used by the organization, expecially Shadow IT.

Top Answer: Amazon is the leader in the cloud and Microsoft Azure with its large Office 365 is not far behind. Without a major disruptive force that can change this, Google will be trailing in this space. I think that Google can catch up if it changes its focus to creating a true enterprise cloud that satisfies the needs of the customer. Google has the technology and resources but lacks focus.

Top Answer: At Palantir, we moved all on prem servers to the cloud (AWS) but did it all as code (as opposed to configuration). There are several reasons for doing it this way and this approach while not new is recently gaining more traction. The idea here is don’t configure anything in your infra, instead describe the end state you want using a declarative language like terraform and then let the tools build the infrastructure for you. This is contrary to the classical approach where it is a combination of code, interspersed with manual config, resulting in fragile infrastructure.
By using this approach, we:

1. are somewhat cloud agnostic (as to the infra is described in a language that works with all major cloud providers)
2. don’t have any administrator as a single point of failure
3. have infra that is repeatable and consistent across environments
4. have a process that is fully integrated it with VCS, CI/CD so there is continuous deployment and automatic tracking of all changes