In my discussions with CIOs, they regularly extol the business value of the public cloud. However, they never suggest that the cloud is a way to simply reduce cost or something to do because it is new or cool. Given this, how can technology leaders accelerate the delivery of business value from the cloud? I recently posed this question to CIOs; this Advisor shares their insights.

Biggest Driver to the Cloud

Let’s start with what excites CIOs about the cloud. I asked them about the biggest driver to the cloud. Wake County, NC, CIO Jonathan Feldman says, “I never really thought about driving the organization to the cloud, I more thought about how we are going to get ‘XYZ’ done. For example, how do we get disaster recovery done? Do we want to rely on an oversubscribed premises provider? Or do nothing? Or take advantage of the hyperscale of cloud?” New Zealand CIO Anthony McMahon makes a similar point, saying, “I haven’t really seen a big drive to move to the cloud; it’s more a consideration of options as part of proper design process … if there is a driver, it’s usually a view to reduce infrastructure overheads and happens at the point of reinvestment.”

But there are definitive business advantages to the cloud. For Miami University CIO David Seidl, the drivers are “flexibility and efficiency, in a close tie. We can leverage not doing things to be more efficient. We can gain flexibility by adopting cloud SaaS [software as a service] and other services.” For Art and Wellness Enterprises CIO Paige Francis, it comes down to the three “Ss”: “In other words, supportability, sustainability, and security. We only need to drive two businesses to the cloud. All the others are already there for the most part. Cloud is a strategy to have less people needing to support all the things.” Taking an industry-wide perspective, Constellation VP and Principal Analyst Dion Hinchcliffe claims that the biggest drivers of organizations to the cloud, are, in rough order:

• Agility (making it easier to turn on IT)

• The application the business wants is there (SaaS)

• Elasticity (handling Black Friday and other surges)

• Cost (a poor reason)

• A modern, future-proof stack

What Inhibits Cloud Adoption & Projects?

Mevotech CIO Martin Davis believes the inhibitors start with a lack of the right resources and skills, especially cloud architects: “Add to this, some vendors seem to be very good, but they do not always provide the skilled people they say they have. There is a lack of skilled resources. Individuals should take the time to modernize themselves. Take a class, get certified, and you will probably get hired. But the know-how to recommend and build robust solutions and evaluate implementation trade-offs remains a learned craft.”

Peeling the onion a bit further, former CIO Isaac Sacolick says, “Many organizations will succeed at building cloud-native applications. The struggle occurs when the effort turns to modernizing applications, data flows, and databases. The jury is out, but lift/shift has many drawbacks including rearchitecting needs talent, investment, and up-front analysis on reengineering experiences. Getting cloud skills both scaled up and scaled out is tough. Tweaking this ratio after the migration can be even tougher.” McMahon adds, “Where people effort is underestimated is the effort to lift and shift, for those new to cloud. This often occurs because of a lack of up-front planning. With this said, it is critical to remember technology is never the outcome, it’s only the enabler.”

Beyond the difficulty of acquiring the talent to migrate to the cloud, Hinchcliffe says the other issues in large organizations are:

• Concern over loss of control

• Worry about “all eggs in one hyperscale basket”

• Overprovisioning worries plus bills

• Data gravity

Hinchcliffe adds that organizations, unfortunately, tend to adopt the cloud tactically, one service or app at a time. They then step back and start to think about their overarching cloud strategy: “But by this time, the initial foundation and trajectory have already been established,” he said. “Unfortunately, it is harder to refactor … I have talked to CIOs and CDOs at large organizations wanting to migrate a lot of their systems to cloud quickly. They simply cannot find the people to build all the teams they need to do it rapidly.”

Can Better People, Process & Technology Help?

Where could better people, process, or technology overcome inhibitors? How do organizations figure out what workloads to move or retain on-premises? And when do you turn off legacy systems? Seidl believes that workloads should be assessed for their fitness for cloud:

We adopt cloud where the cloud is efficient or a better approach. And with success, organizations should turn off legacy systems as soon as they can after go-live. We intentionally call our cloud efforts “cloud appropriate” instead of “cloud first.” This is because we assess what should go, when, and where in their lifecycle. This means we’ve intentionally taken some things slower because it made business sense to do so. Slowdowns tend to be from prioritization conflicts or occasionally from learning curves. We’ve seen some places where our initial assessments were more optimistic than the actual adoption. This, to be fair, was true as well with traditional tools and software.

Meanwhile, Sacolick looks for transformation force multipliers: “These are things that impact revenue plus costs or customer experience plus employee experience. I look for places where there’s a business leader ready to partner on an agile process. High volume or reliability apps where human safety is a factor benefit from a hybrid strategy where there’s on-premises and edge infrastructure load balanced with public cloud.” For Davis, this means “delivering business value in the right way. It is how you best satisfy the business needs while meeting the CFO’s guidance on OPEX and CAPEX.”

To be successful, you must have “patience , plus, a very small, capable team,” says Davis. That said, Hinchcliffe believes that organizations can grow their cloud talent in-house: “Training is easier than it used to be. You just need six months to a year before you plan to surge cloud projects. Having a big cloud partner with a bench in your back pocket helps with talent more immediately. Most organizations should get to know their cloud workloads well. Turning off legacy systems, fortunately, is clear once the last workload they handle has found a home.” However, he adds, “If the legacy system is a SaaS application, as is becoming more frequent given how long we’ve had cloud, there can be issues with stragglers and rug pulling. Loads that don’t vary much and don’t need to be highly performant or have lots of data egress can be better on private cloud.”

Effective Management of Cloud Projects

Next, I asked CIOs about how they manage their cloud projects. Who is typically in charge? Francis says that it is important to have a project manager [PM] and project management tooling. In addition, “You need regular team meetings and the involvement of technology leadership,” she says. Meanwhile, Seidl treats cloud projects like he does other deployments: “We use our project managers and business associates, and then either technical, integration, or infrastructure teams as appropriate to the cloud effort. As with everything we do, it is critical to work closely with partners.”

Davis agrees: “You need a project or program manager; at the end of the day, cloud is just a technology, projects still need to be properly managed.” “Who is in charge is less important than who makes the recommendations and who makes the decisions,” adds McMahon. “Mostly, the cloud component should be a phase of a bigger project rather than a standalone project. I think this is about how you define the problem. Recommendations should come as part of the overall solution design, which needs to utilize optionality. Decisions shouldn’t be made in isolation, and the PM’s role is to facilitate both.” “Cloud projects include apps, services, and data programs that are utilizing cloud infrastructure,” says Sacolick. “I recommend a co-creation model for these programs with a product/business leader paired with a delivery leader.” In terms of leading these projects, Hinchcliffe says, “The answer remains a project or program manager. For cloud migration, it may be an IT manager. For cloud infrastructure, it may be enterprise architecture.”

Parting Words

There are clear business reasons driving cloud acceleration and adoption. Unfortunately, talent, as in other areas of business transformation, is a major inhibitor. That said, smart CIOs figure out how to grow their talent organically before it needs to surge. This, of course, requires a business and IT strategy and an associated talent plan.