It's not them, it's you

This blog is re-posted with permission.  It originally appeared here:  https://cloud.vmware.com/community/2018/01/23/ask-alex-part-1/

It is part of a multi-part series on public cloud strategy for enterprises. 

In part one, he’ll answer the question: “My internal developers want to move to public cloud. What is it about public cloud that’s so great that they want to leave the on-premises environment?”

There is a joke going around the internet about cloud: “There is no cloud, just someone else’s ops team.”

It’s funny because it’s true. While the current rise of cloud has everyone agog about the possibilities and amaze-balls stuff that the cloud can do, the reality is that there is no magic there. Everything that folks like us or Amazon are doing are things you could in theory, do on-premises.

However, in practice cloud is totally different. Why is that?

• Cloud is about scale. There are some things that are difficult or impossible to do unless you have massive scale.
• Cloud is about on-demand. Because of #1 above, you can usually just show up and ask for things.
• Cloud is about a customer-centric business model. This is less obvious and often forgotten. Cloud assumes a customer-centric business model.

On the other hand, most enterprise IT organizations have different priorities and missions. Normally, IT is tasked with things like ROI, security, stability, etc.. These goals are often in direct conflict with what a developer is trying to do.

In reality, developers are not really running towards cloud. What they’re seeking is getting the freedom to do their thing the way they want to do it.

To say it another way, it’s not them. It’s you.

Cloud flight may be a problem for your organization or it may be just fine. It really depends on what your overall cloud strategy is and how you plan to support those applications AFTER they get developed. The issue for IT is not massive movement to cloud. The absolutely terrifying thing is when YOU DON’T KNOW WHY you’re doing it.

As we discussed in our blog post about IT portfolio management, it is very common for applications to move from “High Potential” where cost is less of an object to “Key Operational” where cost is the #1 consideration over time. Thus, the long term impact of this trend is that you may be “stuck” with applications that were developed for a specific cloud platform that is no longer appropriate for the economics of that platform.

The reality is that there is no one answer that is correct for every organization and every application.

What you need to do is to think about your long term goals and then align your IT policies and procedures to optimize for those goals.

For example, if you have internal development teams that are working on applications that are core to your business, you will want to have a multi-year strategy about how you will manage those applications throughout their life-cycle. This strategy will then inform the platform and tooling decisions you make.

In the end, you cannot force tooling and platforms to your application development teams. Because of public cloud, they can simply take their business elsewhere.

This means that you need to be a true service provider to your internal customers and to focus on what they really need from you.

Like any business you will have to identify your target market and decide what business you are in. Not all customers are worth the cost of acquisition and you may choose not to service all internal customers all the time. That’s OK. One huge mistake that IT makes is to assume they are the only game in town and try to be all things to all people. That way leads to madness. You may not be able to serve everyone. Again, that’s OK.

The other aspect of this plan is to think about what your internal customers really NEED as opposed to what they say they WANT. The difference between expressed customer wants and actually (usually unexpressed) NEEDS is the difference between mediocre businesses and hugely successful ones. There is a great book about this subject by Mahan Khalsa called “Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play.” I highly recommend this book to any/all IT leadership seeking to transform their IT organizations into customer-centric service organizations.

To summarize, why are developers moving to public cloud and away from on-premises?

1. You are not meeting their needs.
2. They have business needs that you cannot meet.
3. They have a real business need that means public cloud is the correct place for them to be.

If you are in case 2 or 3, you are probably fine. However, if you are in case 1, I would seriously look at this and figure out what is really going on.