On April 1 of this year, the Department of Defense announced that the US Navy would embark on a strategy to migrate its services to the cloud. While there have been numerous cases of big and small companies making this leap over the past few months, this one struck a particular chord with me because of its sheer scope. The US Navy is an organization utilizing 1,400 systems and 7,000 applications to serve more than 500,000 employees. My company, which is approximately .017%, .019% and .00028% the size of the USN in relative scope, made the transition years ago and it was no small effort taking almost 3 years to fully make the transition.
While the USN is relatively mum about its specific strategies, there are references to the fact that they intend to cut their systems in half within 36 months, reducing some overhead cost and modernizing. This is similar to the approach that the CIA has undertaken in moving much of its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services. These transitions, even when scaled down to a company of 140 like mine, require a substantial amount of planning, commitment, resources and time with little room for error. So it comes as no surprise that whenever I spend time with industry peers who have yet to move to the cloud, there is a palpable sense of fear and overwhelming anxiety about how to even think about the process.
When I'm asked to advise people on how they might craft strategies to get to the cloud, I give a four-point overview based on my own experience. It will get you to the starting line, but beyond that each and every strategy will be different depending on a myriad of circumstances in your corporation.
Move only what you have to and start fresh wherever possible
The first thing is to dispatch with the idea that you are going to "move" all of your current resources into the cloud. That is just not possible, especially if you have invested heavily in distributed enterprise class systems and the infrastructure to support them. While it is certainly likely that a good portion of your environment can be virtualized and moved into a Platform as a Service (PaaS)/Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment like Amazon Web Services, the move to the cloud should be viewed as an opportunity to leave systems behind and replace them with systems that are lighter, faster and less expensive.
Tear down and rebuild your security model
If your Microsoft SysAdmin has convinced you that Active Directory is a viable solution for the cloud, or that because you use Active Directory you can only get into the cloud by sticking with solutions that support Active Director (AD)/Windows Azure Active Directory (WAAD), you need to get a second opinion. When moving to the cloud you have to consider that many solutions do not allow for authentication off of Active Directory and instead rely on more common security protocols such as SAML1, SAML2, OID and OAuth. Identity Access Management (IAM) vendors have been forced to consider brokering authentication for Active Directory because companies feel like they must stay on it as an internal authentication platform. Nothing could be further from the truth and if you do your research, you will discover that there is a wealth of options out there. To get into the cloud you need the most robust and extensible authentication model you can possibly build and by doing so your options for solutions will increase exponentially.
Cost savings are a benefit, not a driver
If you think that you need to get into the cloud to save money, you need to think again. Yes, you will ultimately save money by migrating to the cloud, lots of money in fact, but it takes time to get there and there is the chance that you will actually spend more money upfront. When making your pitch to senior management, talk about the benefits of reduced infrastructure, resources, better uptime, business continuity enhancements, mobility and access ubiquity. If asked about cost savings, be ready to deliver your pitch on how you intend to reduce or eliminate capex spending, reduce personnel resources, move services to a pay by month model eliminating long term contracts and ultimately reduce your annual budget by a modest percentage year over year over a 3-5 year period of time. Do not get caught in the trap of making cost savings one of your drivers for going into the cloud. You will bring a level of scrutiny over your claims, on which you will most likely be unable to deliver.
Create a long-term flexible strategy
The last bit of wisdom is to develop the most thorough 1-, 3- and 5-year cloud strategy that you can put down. My 1-year strategy is very specific; my 3-year is slightly less specific because I find that even 3 years down the road is very hard to see. It's impossible to see five years in the future, but if you work backwards from 5 years you can, even at a very amorphous level, describe how you would want your environment to look at that point. These should be rolling strategies that are flexible enough to consider the dynamics of the industries you will operate in. Today's Identity Access Management vendor will be tomorrow's Mobile Device Management (MDM) vendor and a week from now, could be bought by a company in some entirely different vertical. By creating a flexible strategy, you can constantly adapt to these changing conditions in the industry over which you have almost no control.
In considering these four concepts, keep in mind that they are applicable to any size organization and any cloud scope transformation. The more I have considered them, the more I have realized that they are applicable anywhere. It's no small task, but you can move your company into the cloud if you approach things with a new mind and put aside the technologies of the past.
One last thing to note...in the next five years, new employees coming into your company won't know (or care) how to use Outlook or mapped drives. They won't care for your PC laptop offering or why your firewall blocks Dropbox. They will have established methods for doing work and they will all involve the cloud. Seventy-five out of the top 100 universities in the latest US News and World Report college rankings use Google Apps as their primary backbone. Seven of the 8 Ivies are in the same boat. Do you really want to be the last one at the starting line?
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