Cloud Paralysis

Cloud Paralysis: an organisations inability to migrate and optimise workloads or applications to a modern platform due to the constant change of the underlying technology or latest new capability that will change the world.

A new term I’ve coined to try and explain to myself (and others) why organisations aren’t moving as fast as expected.

Why, with all the technology progress and innovation has this been happening for some time now at least in the context of public cloud? The result is the continued creep towards out of support and insecure platforms and technology that costs more to operate.

When do we draw a line in the sand, start to modernise and only then plan to migrate to the next new capability rather than continually put it off until capability x is available?

Everyone seems to be focused on the new capabilities being offered, yet at an enterprise level it is extremely rare that we would adopt a new technology in to production without clear proof that it is operable and secure. Couple the production need with time running out on risk and resilience matters and there is an absolute need to increase operational automation to support improved resilience and platform up time and not just the CI/CD of new toys.

The loudest voices in an organisation can typically be the agents of change (until there is an outage, then it’s the ops team), which is great to help create disruption and change to the status quo but that must be balanced with a lasting operability. One of the reasons we see limited production workloads utilising new tech is the fact an organisation must be able to support it in 3, 6 or 18 months’ time, without the ability to do that who in their right mind would sign off putting it live to customers?

Automation is still the key to stability, security and pace therefore should be the cornerstone of any strategy and that automation should be 10x scalable and well understood by all - when it goes wrong it still needs fixing.

On top of all this technology change it is normal for engineers to move roles with more frequency, meaning the framework of non-complex automation and service introduction is more critical than ever. We talk about everything being ‘defined as code’ which is fantastic if you understand that code, but more confusing than ever if you don’t. Organisations have not wholesale created the capability to understand it across their teams.

The solution? Can be as simple as committing to the changes that can be executed and operated today, then support your teams to ensure what gets started, gets completed! The nature of starting to move forward will build a capability that can then continually iterate, pivoting your organisation to newer technology where appropriate.

It is also critical to work with a partner who shares your goals and understand the unique challenges faced by your organisation. A partner who can introduce technology that is automated, resilient and operable.