By BreakFree Solutions Staff
Digital is built on the cloud; how you enable cloud usage matters. You must enable broad and effective consumption of cloud-native services, patterns, and platforms while ensuring a secure, solid foundation.
Users of the cloud platform and services will need to be educated as to how to use it, requiring systems that enable its use across the enterprise.
Here are 5 musts to effectively enable and operationalize your cloud capabilities.
1. Operationalize platforms and products with a minimally viable cloud foundation layer.
Taking a minimally viable product, or MVP, approach means you’re not designing a solution for everything, but building a product that includes most capabilities needed to start, while you continue to evolve the product and add features and functions. For your cloud foundations, don’t try to boil the ocean, or create a platform for every possible need. If you do, you’ll never finish the product and get it in front of consumers. Minimally viable cloud foundations provide the solutions to this.
2. Use APIs to ensure your foundations don’t limit the velocity of your platforms and products.
APIs, or Application Program Interfaces, allow users to perform a function without needing to write unique code every time they wish to complete that action. It’s best to use APIs for foundational elements, as in those that aren’t often changing and are shared by multiple groups.
The use of APIS for shared elements of the platform will significantly reduce the time to deliver services as opposed to having to send ticketing requests
3. Platforms are Products.
Platforms should be treated as products that IT and business executives continue to support and invest in. Cloud consumption that's meant to support function should be hyper-focused on consumption and impact. When we use the product model (treating platforms as products), we build investments in engineering services and templates that are successful based on how well we can demonstrate consumption and impact. In previous years, IT has been all about services, with an, “If I build it, they will come,” mentality. When a client approached an IT organization and with a request, IT constructed a response to that need (being reactive to demands).
Product mentality means you’re not waiting to respond to demands and building standard responses around what the “ask” is. Instead, you profile the needs of a group, especially those who seek to build innovative things on cloud, like data engineers and software developers, analyze what they want to build or accomplish in the future, and construct a platform product that you believe will have impact. Then, go out and try to get that product consumed and focus on demonstrating its impact. For more on this, check out [link].
4. Support SaaS Adoption.
Undoubtedly, you’ll need the capabilities to potentially support many SaaS applications, but make sure you don’t let your user community confuse SaaS applications with your cloud capabilities. You need a SaaS-specific approach with foundational goals to rapidly integrate and effectively operate SaaS. There are thousands of cloud services taking low variability commodity software and turning it into a managed SaaS solution consumed through a web browser. We help companies understand that they should not fight the adoption of SaaS. SaaS is here to stay and a great tool for potentially solving for a multitude of issues. Additionally, a lot of software in SaaS is duplicate to what is in the data center.
5. Focus on providing new capabilities as opposed to how to migrate existing on-premise workloads.
Moving existing applications to the cloud won’t give you any digital advantage you don’t already have. Cloud enablement is about providing the platform and services necessary to allow rapid, secure, compliant development of new digital business applications.
An effectively enabled cloud platform can be a significant force multiplier for your organization, if done properly. If you’re looking to improve your cloud capabilities, BreakFree is here to help!