As the newly appointed ICT Manager for a large government agency, Jeff was keen to make his mark quickly and decisively in his new role. Looking at the IT spend over the last three years, he could see that in spite of the market shifting considerably, the agency had been paying exorbitant amounts for application hosting. The market had trended downwards with pressure from large Cloud providers like AWS. Looking at their hosting arrangements more closely, Jeff could not only see their costs remained largely unchanged but also, service reliability had been steadily declining. This project looked like an ideal candidate to reduce cost, increase service levels, and make the mark he wanted.

After looking at the current environment carefully, a current rebuild of the primary public website for the agency appeared to be a good choice. The site was currently in development using AWS services. The development team had chosen AWS for development due to its low cost, well within their budget. Far more compelling to them was the speed with which the developers could provision and utilise the necessary resources. What would typically take internal IT weeks to provide for the developers could be accomplished inside a day using AWS management tools and company best practice.
Using managed services such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk, not only did the development team have ready access to a low-cost development environment they could provision on demand. They could also run parallel application stacks for testing. That just wasn’t possible using their existing infrastructure that was difficult to access and manage. As such, the AWS services allowed new configurations to be tested quickly at a fraction of the cost of traditional infrastructure. Cents per hour, versus a few hundred dollars a month.

With the application completed, launch day and migration commenced. Fortunately, Jeff had identified that the team needed an AWS partner to assist with the migration. This lead to the realisation that a scalable architecture was required to support the fluctuating demand on the website. With the right design, the right AWS partner, the site was migrated and delivered a 75% saving on the former hosting costs. With the automated scaling and monitoring, AWS services provided as part of the production environment, site outages dropped to less than 1% over first few months of operation, improving even more over time. The site had gone from 2 – 3 outages per month on the old hosting, due to network and other issues, to no unscheduled outages from one month to the next.

At this point, one would think this would be the end of the story. The primary production site was on AWS at a fraction of the former cost. Service levels were higher than they ever had been. The new problem that was beginning to emerge was cost control and environmental regulation.

With the success of this project, Jeff’s teams started moving more and more projects to AWS. As more teams in the organisation also adopted this approach, keeping an eye on resource usage started becoming more challenging. Managing what teams and individuals had access to resources was also emerging as a challenge. The situation Jeff was finding himself in after an initial easy win is quite common. Many companies who discovered server virtualisation during the mid-2000’s also learned technology on its own can create all new challenges nobody had previously anticipated.

The simple answer to why Cloud is relevant to your business today is the agility it provides and the transfer of CapEx to OpEx. Not to mention the tangible cost savings you can make. What’s important for ICT managers to understand, however, is the importance of a structured approach to Cloud Adoption. Not every workload is going to be a suitable candidate for migration. Ongoing success requires the implementation of a Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and the establishment of a Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE). Neither of which need to be as daunting as they sound. The CAF examines your current environment and assesses what workloads would work in the Cloud. It highlights six perspectives around Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations. In so doing, it ensures thought is given to each of these within the context of Cloud. What training do your people need for example, when a particular application gets migrated to the Cloud? How would their roles change? What operational support would they need?

A CCoE should be seen as the thought leadership and delivery enablement team that will help plan and execute on the CAF. It usually consists of SMEs from each principal area the CAF examines. By choosing an AWS Consulting Partner like Consegna, who understand this pragmatic, structured approach to cloud adoption and digital transformation, ongoing long-term success starts from a solid foundation.

The discoveries Jeff made during his journey to Cloud are being made by ICT managers on a near-daily basis. An increasing number of Jeff’s peers understand that Cloud is a timely and necessary step to reduce cost and increase agile productivity. Those with that extra slice of understanding and knowledge are working with partners like Consegna to do Digital Transformation the smart way. Putting CAF and CCoE at the forefront of their journey, and seeing great successes in doing so.