The Jody and Steve Show Part 3

05:54 – Steve identifies what you need  to make Cloud work for your organisation.

07:12 – Jody: User productivity is the determining factor of the gap between business and IT. If your users are happy with the service that IT is delivering to them, the business is getting value from IT.

07:25 – Steve enumerates the factors that would make you ready for the Cloud.

08:16 – People who own their career love any kind of emerging technology because it gives them an opportunity to learn more.

09:07 – If you embrace Cloud, learn it and bring value to your organisation, you’ll become indispensable in the new Cloud world.

Voice-over: The following program contains subject matter and language that might be disturbing to some moving to the Cloud decision-makers that have bought into the marketing hype that Cloud will solve all your business needs. Viewer discretion advised. Now, from the ThinClient studios, it’s the Jody & Steve Show.[applause]

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Steve: We’ve identified some differences and unique characteristics of adopting Cloud computing. In this section, we’re going to address what you can do about that and how you can master it.

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Steve Jody, you had this thing you mentioned about getting your house in order. I think that’s an interesting launching point. What did you mean by that?

Jody: If you just think about the simple concept of building a house, if you have foundations in the crack of your house, and  you try to build a house on top of that, you can absolutely expect to have a lot of problems. It’s the same concept with Cloud. If you don’t have an infrastructure that has the right processes in place, that has a number of technology components really nailed down, monitored, managed effectively, all geared towards user productivity, and you’d pick that up and move it to a Cloud platform, you can expect to have the same problems on steroids.

Steve: Basically, you’re saying if you have a crappy environment that’s insecure and not built well, and putting it in the Cloud, it will be a crappy insecure environment in the Cloud. Maybe worse.

Jody: I’ll actually take it a step further than that because I don’t think it needs to be a crappy infrastructure. I think that most organisations have challenges in their environment. They know that they’re not enabling the highest level of productivity for a myriad of reasons. There seems to be this impression that customers can solve some of those problems by moving workloads to the Cloud. It just exacerbates the challenges they already have.

Steve: The one thing I see every day is the traditional environment through CyLoad and to the network guys, the storage guys, the app guys, the OS guys, the Hypervisor guys. There is no distinction in the Cloud. It’s all one framework. It has to be unified, designed and worked together.

Jody: That’s right. That’s why they call them workloads in the Cloud. It’s what we’ve been talking about.

Steve: It’s not play loads, it’s workloads.

[laughter]

Jody: Exactly.

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Jody: I think that when you look at an existing infrastructure, it’s important for customers to understand what are we doing well, what do we need to improve upon, and what do we absolutely don’t have insight into. That’s a big one because we run into that a lot with customers where they’re running decent environments, but they know that user productivity isn’t quite where it needs to be. Sometimes they’re afraid to interact with the users and actually get those real answers, and sometimes they’re unable to get those answers.

There’s all kinds of some of those challenges that exist. I think that the technology pieces– I want to ask you, Steve, what technology aspects of an infrastructure do you guys run into a lot that you could see playing either a positive or a negative role in a Cloud migration?

Steve: The most negative one is, as Ray said, it’s siloing. People get attached to specialties. That doesn’t really apply in the Cloud. You have to have a holistic vision, and you have to touch it. A lot of it too is brute force, solving a performance issue with more horsepower. You are going to be very [unintelligible 00:03:33] in the Cloud if you double your processors and your memory to make it run better because you’re going to be paying twice as much. Sometimes big dollars.

A single machine can be $100 or $200 a month, double that up, add some storage, it’s double, triple more. Especially if it’s special workloads like Sequel, so rightsizing is a huge, huge risk, security model and identity management, you mentioned earlier. If you don’t have an identity management framework and solution, and now you go into a public Cloud environment, what the hell is going to happen?

Jody: Yes, and you mentioned earlier, talking about virtualisation. I think it was a really good point. Virtualisation enabled all of us not to care about resource allocation on servers. That is inherently dangerous in the Cloud for those reasons. I don’t know many customers that are in a private Cloud that absolutely have a clear handle on exactly what resource allocation needs to be across their virtualisation environment in order to maximize productivity of that environment.

Steve: And that is a tenant of Cloud. You must go into Cloud, defining a workload. Actually, it’s minimum requirements. I’ve talked about how when you’re a big bad IT guy over the years, you learn to get the biggest server you can to anticipate load. Cloud is 180 degrees opposite. You will not do well if you approach it that way.

Jody: That’s right.

Steve: Lot of things are different.

Jody: It occurs to me too as we’re having this conversation that there’s a whole other component there that’s really interesting. We always talk about it in this industry for years now, the gap that exist between the business and IT. The reason that gap exists is simply because the business isn’t getting the value that they want to get out of IT. There’s a thousand reasons for that, and they differ between organisations. It’s unimportant though. There’s that gap.

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Steve: Think about this, IT’s the only place where a business gives you a finite budget and an undefined set of goals. Basically, you have this much money to accomplish whatever we ask you. It’s not realistic, and Cloud will not help in any way with that problem, so the disconnect. Here’s the theme that I’m developing from what you’re saying. If you have a good security model, good understanding of workload monitoring, understand the business, and the business and IT are aligned, you have identity management, everything under control, Cloud will be a natural progression to you.

You will still have to go learn it. The way to learn it is do what I did, waste a bunch of money, learn the hard way, study, find experts, learn from them, bring customers on, live it and experience it, you’ll be okay. If those things are not right, the Cloud will have no effect on them and may make it worse.

Jody: Absolutely. I think there’s another important component there too. You can kill two birds with one stone, which IT has got to find better ways, more ways to accomplish that. If you think about what you’re talking about, most organisations don’t have all those things nailed down. There is that gap that exists. By understanding, by focusing on getting your house in order, in other words, shoring those things up, you have an immediate impact to user productivity. You have an immediate impact in delivering value to the business.

Steve: Before you even try to go to Cloud.

Jody: You have to talk about Cloud. If somebody else wants to talk about Cloud within the organisation, you’re prepared to do that because now you have more insight and you have more value. Look, user productivity is the determining factor of the gap between business and IT. If your users are happy with the service that IT is delivering to them, the business is getting value from IT.

Steve: In summary, what I’m hearing is if the business and IT are in sync, you have control control of your systems, good understanding of performance, security, management, you’re probably ready for the Cloud, you can move forward.

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Steve: Jody, how about perception of the Cloud from within organisations, especially IT organisations, and how they feel it’s going to impact their job, and their career, and their future?

Jody: It’s interesting. Whenever it comes down to the human piece, I get so interested. That’s the stuff I could count on. I think it depends on the individual and the individuals within those organisations, and how they think about their own career. What I mean by that is, people that I know that own their career, and assume responsibility for their career, absolutely love this, love any kind of emerging technology because it gives them an opportunity to learn more.

People that don’t, and depend more upon their organisations to guide them, they’re going to have a little more challenge around any emerging technology. Cloud is no different. I think where Cloud really gets interesting for me in that light is that they can learn so much so quickly, and add so much value back to the business, to our point around getting your house in order and providing additional value to the business. By doing that in Cloud with a partner, they can do that faster and they actually will become more essential to the business.

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Steve: I think that’s the theme that I see. If you resist Cloud, and push it off and say it’s a threat to me, it will be a threat to you. If you embrace it, learn it and bring value to your organisation, you’ll become indispensable in the new Cloud world.

Jody: That’s right. Once again, as humans, it’s all about perspective.

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Steve: Thank you for listening. We’ve identified challenges with Cloud, possible solutions. We’ve identified that if you have your house in order, you’re ready for Cloud and move forward. If you’re not, and you feel some help is needed, reach out to Jody, from Insentra, and Steve, from ThinClient Computing. Good luck to you.

[applause]

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