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By Jason Deck, VP Strategic Development, Logicworks

Nearly half of organisations meet major roadblocks after the initial stage of a digital project, according to a recent survey. These early failures are potentially disastrous for a project; when IT teams fail to deliver early successes, the entire endeavour starts to look like a bad idea.

A misstep in the early phases of a cloud project can take all the momentum out of cloud adoption. Failure or strain in proof of concept migrations not only threaten the success of current cloud projects, but also dramatically reduces the likelihood of the organisation continuing to invest in cloud technology. This is bad news for IT modernisation efforts and the long-term transformation of enterprise infrastructure.

What causes these early failures? Is it poor strategic planning, insufficient training, or bad technology? The solution requires enterprises to adopt new risk management strategies — and leave behind strategies that were effective when IT was a static, monolithic back office provider.  

Cloud automation

The traditional IT service model says that infrastructure needs to be updated every five years and manually maintained in between. But the cloud finally gives IT the opportunity to design infrastructure to evolve continually.

When you treat your cloud like a system that needs to be manually maintained and upgraded, you quickly reach the point where new rapid product development cycles clash with static infrastructure. IT tries to make changes to the cloud manually to keep up with demand, and because there is no central change management and everything is “custom”, phase two cloud projects stall.

The answer to early stage failure is to stop treating your infrastructure as a system that must be manually maintained, and instead equip your team with tools that allow them to centrally maintain the cloud with minimal manual effort

The answer to early stage failure is to stop treating your infrastructure as a system that must be manually maintained, and instead equip your team with tools that allow them to centrally maintain — and make changes to — the cloud with minimal manual effort. The answer is cloud automation.

Cloud infrastructure must be built from day one to evolve. It must be built so engineers are only touching the abstraction level above server-level maintenance, so that changes are centralised and immediately system-wide. This dramatically accelerates cloud maintenance and also ensures that the system has the proper controls to validate, control, and version changes to infrastructure.

Cloud automation makes it possible to spin up fully-configured resources in minutes. It guarantees compliance and governance across the enterprise by automatically and consistently checking on the status of logs, installing monitoring tools, and shipping data to cold storage.

This reduces friction between development teams and operations, allowing developers to keep up with business demands and systems engineers to focus on improving what matters, not on manual patches and reconfigurations. Automation reduces human effort, streamlines processes, and therefore reduces the disjointed, process-less quagmire that usually plagues new cloud teams.

However, there is a potential pitfall here. Some enterprises believe they can build their cloud environments from scratch and then automate “later”, when their team’s experience grows. But cloud automation is a difficult task that requires a specialised set of skills and a lot of time. Unfortunately, by the time that team gets around to figuring out AWS CloudFormation, configuration management, and deployment automation, they are already knee-deep in the cloud issues.

Successful cloud project leaders realise that they cannot wait six to 12 months for internal staff to write custom automation scripts. Instead, they turn to an external provider to integrate and automate their cloud environment from day one. This requires more than a consulting engagement, and usually means bringing in a managed service provider like Logicworks comes in during the early stages of a project to create automation scripts that can continue to manage automation after migration.

As I have written about before, cloud automation should be the core service offering of every MSP. In the coming years, enterprises will clarify the support they need — and find that of all the many tasks in a cloud adoption process, cloud automation makes the most sense to outsource. MSPs will develop a core library of automation scripts, and this intellectual property will be the foundation of their success. MSPs will accelerate cloud adoption and allow enterprises to run on top of more secure, more highly available clouds.

Enterprise support

Even when clouds are fully automated, enterprises rarely cut system support teams. Instead, they use them with greater effectiveness, focusing them on supporting a greater volume and velocity of product development.

But it takes enterprise teams some time to adapt to a new cloud process. At early stages, having your main compute cluster fail at 11am on a Tuesday could spell disaster for the entire project. To mitigate these risks, enterprises with successful cloud projects usually invest in AWS Enterprise Support.

Cloud automation should be the core service offering of every MSP. In the coming years, enterprises will clarify the support they need, and find that cloud automation makes the most sense to outsource

AWS Enterprise Support is fast, reliable, expert service. We have seen detailed email responses to technical issues from experts in less than two minutes and resolution in 10. Infact, the only problem with AWS Enterprise Support is that more businesses want it than have the budget for it.

As you might expect, these time-intensive services come with a price; it costs a minimum of $15,000 a month or 10% of your usage bill, whichever is greater. A selection of these services is available at their Business Tier starting at $10,000 a month. For many SMBs, AWS Premium Support is simply not an option — especially when they are experimenting with a limited number of POCs and a limited budget.

The answer? Find an MSP that gives every client – even the small ones – access to AWS Enterprise Support — included in the regular cost of maintenance.

How is a $15,000 service ‘included’? You can take advantage of the fact that the AWS MSP Partner has other clients, and your collective budget gives your service provider access to AWS support engineers. It is a little-known benefit that you can get access to AWS Enterprise Support and fund your MSP for the same cost as you can get AWS Enterprise Support on your own.

Set up your team for early wins

Pairing AWS Enterprise Support with automation significantly de-risks cloud adoption.  

When you bring on a strong, automation-focused partner and AWS support in early, you have a better experience and derive greater value from the cloud faster than if you rely on internal teams alone. A good MSP will not only ensure the success of early projects, but will use early projects to establish migration patterns to facilitate future migrations. They maintain early momentum, accelerating all-in cloud adoption.

It is easier to avoid early cloud issues than climb out of them later. The usual strategy — hire more short-term consultants and give workshops on DevOps philosophy — are usually more expensive in the long term that implementing the real structural changes necessary to automate and control your cloud.

Whatever happened to those intelligent fridges we were promised? The ones that would send you a message telling you to order more oranges, or notify your online retailer to deliver more dairy. Those clever fridges were the most talked about example of how the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) was meant to transform our lives. But they never quite arrived.
Is the IoT myth or reality? And if it is reality, what impact is it likely to have on our everyday lives? And why does business automation hold the key to IoT success in your organization? It’s time to find out.

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Picture credit: “San Diego Safari Park”, by “Eric Gorski”, used under CC BY NC SA

When did you last take a walk around your IT division? What did you see? More importantly, what did you not see? Are the professionals responsible for storage, networking and your server virtualisation program working together or apart? Could any of them step into another’s shoes, move across teams or come into work tomorrow morning prepared to turn things upside down and do it all differently?

In short, would you say your IT department resembles a free range safari park or a set of zoo enclosures? The answer is important. The skillset and culture of your IT infrastructure team could make or break your company’s chances of becoming a successful digital enterprise.

The simple truth is that you cannot build an agile, customer-centric business on a disconnected IT infrastructure, managed by a disconnected team. To achieve the integration, speed, scalability and resilience, a digital business needs you to converge your IT infrastructure – and to do the same with your team.

It is easy to underestimate how radical and unsettling this could be for the IT professionals in your organisation. First of all, IT convergence involves breaking down barriers between organisational silos, standardising and automating processes and changing the way these are monitored and managed.

Converged infrastructures can resemble IT services more than hardware systems. For many of the professionals working in infrastructure, that can be quite a leap, professionally and emotionally. Most IT professionals will instinctively translate these changes into, at best, a loss of familiarity, influence or authority and at worst, unemployment. Few will see it for what it can also be: a chance to upskill, future-proof their professional career and invigorate their skills, or a release from the monotony of maintenance to add creative value elsewhere.

Secondly, today’s highly-trained IT professional is likely to have followed an established course of education and professional development, sometimes up to chartered status and beyond. The learning frameworks for these qualifications can be slow to change. Many still reflect the requirements of an earlier, more traditional IT environment, with computing, networking and data storage covered in isolated modules. New courses are needed, and needed now.

A converged environment, for example, requires a deep, blended skill set including all the above areas, as well as a good grasp of management, design, software, service delivery and wider business needs. 

Further, the introduction of convergence supports other emerging IT roles, which themselves combine different skill sets. These include information architects, who blend system administration skills with an understanding of how these systems integrate with existing technical operations and business processes, and DevOps professionals, who fuse development and operations to transform the speed at which applications are created and deployed. 

Change in one area influences and is influenced by change elsewhere. One by one established IT operations, development and service roles are being transformed. CIOs and their frontline IT managers need to work with HR to understand and address the implications of this ripple effect. 

Industry commentators are divided on how well CIOs understand this. According to Gartner, 81 per cent of CIOs are overly focused on the near term, the next three years at most. At the same time, the IT industry trade association, CompTIA expressed surprise at the revelation in its 2015 global workforce survey that in an age of digital technologies it’s the skills gaps in networking, storage and computing that are accorded the greatest priority. There is clearly a gap between the infrastructure skills companies have and the skills they need.

Training in new infrastructure solutions such as converged and hyper-converged technologies is becoming business-critical. Not just informal, on-the-job training to meet immediate needs, but robust, certified training. The practical benefit as well as the emotional reassurance of this should not be underestimated. CompTIA’s study showed that a significant 44 per cent of respondents in the UK say that IT certified staff offer more value to the organisation, with certification in infrastructure technologies topping the list in terms of overall added value and ROI.

Our own VCE Certified Professionals Program, for example, introduced in April 2014, helps IT professionals to develop the skills needed to design, deploy and manage converged infrastructure as a seamless, single environment. Every month, around 500 newly certified VCE converged infrastructure professionals return to their desks ready to change the world.

It is time to break down the walls of resistance and tradition that are suffocating IT. No-one embarks on a career in technology hoping that every day will be the same as the one before. IT professionals need to rediscover their thirst for knowledge, their passion and their aspiration to become more, and CIOs need to lead by example. The age of cages is over and the open savannah awaits.

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