But not every surprise in the cloud is unwelcome. For Pacific Life, the ease of host-based security has been among the pleasant surprises, says Vigil. “In the cloud, there is way better security than we could ever hope to offer on-premises --without the cost,’’ he says.
The elasticity of the cloud has also been a big bonus. “On-premises we could do virtualization, but to scale up and down still requires that we have peak capacity in the form of hardware and in the cloud, we only rent what we need,’’ he says.
Salari has enjoyed being able to test something out in the cloud. He says he goes into his AWS lab account, buys compute in the marketplace and plays around with it for a week, all for around $7. “I love being able to kick the tires a little,’’ he says. “I would have loved to do this more when I was an engineer. It would have made things so much easier.”
PwC has also experienced happy surprises, says CIO Sigal Zarmi. The agility, efficiency and simplicity of the cloud have been a bonus, she says, and PwC’s employees view the cloud as a new way of working, rather than the technology itself.
“A great ‘gotcha’ moment for us was a recent survey of our people, where they estimated they were saving around nine hours a week by collaborating differently, having access to online communications tools and access to information when and where they needed it,” Zarmi says.
Salari anticipates Pacific Life will have all its web pages migrated to the cloud by the end of 2018, with the goal of getting all of its disaster recovery infrastructure into AWS by then as well. Within three to five years, he expects they will have most of their workloads and apps in a cloud environment. “We will only have things on-premises for licensing or practicalities,’’ he says. “We’re a big mainframe organization because we’re financial, so we’ll always be hybrid.”
How to avoid the pitfalls
Like Pacific Life has found, observers and users say a lot of education and re-education is required on how the cloud works and what the benefits are and how the model differs from an on-premises infrastructure.
“The more your engineering staff and leaders learn about cloud and see other companies are doing things with it, the less anxiety they have and the more comfortable they are talking about what we can do -- and not what we can’t,’’ says Salari.
Both Salari and Vigil also recommend that IT staffs get comfortable using native and third-party tools, especially as they utilize multi-cloud providers. Having cloud-agnostic tools is also very important, says Vigil, especially ones that can be used on-premises, too.
Organizations should also plan accordingly because of the breadth of services available in the cloud, advises Cancila. Although they want to leverage “this endless capacity and innovation curve” that cloud computing offers, “for many … it can become quickly overwhelming, especially as they think about the ways they go about budgeting, architecting and managing those ongoing services on an ongoing basis,” she says.
Understand what your current data footprint is and what it will be in the cloud world – and the cost, says Kiely.
“If you’re looking to move major business systems to cloud like manufacturing software and ERP systems, really map out your business processes as part of your implementation plan,’’ he says, “and look at what you’re doing today in the different business units and map out how that can be mimicked or not in the new world order. Cloud is a double-edged sword. It unlocks amazing possibilities,” including the ability to tap into an ecosystem of partners for best-in-class systems. “That’s the beauty of this thing, but in our experience, part of the challenge is things aren’t necessarily as customizable on the fly as they might be with an on-premises system.”
Utilizing cloud technology is an opportunity to “spring clean what you’ve got, and why, even if it means having difficult conversations with the business,’’ says Zarmi. It also requires creating new ways of working with risk and security teams, rethinking disaster recovery, cybersecurity and resilience, she says. “But never overlook the basics: giving people a fast moving, more responsive environment relies on strong change management processes.”
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