A few years ago, my uncle Sumit visited a doctor for a
health check and submitted his reports. The doctor, upon reviewing Sumit's history, expressed astonishment, saying, "You smoke, don't exercise, work long hours, have poor sleep patterns, and high cholesterol levels." The doctor joked to my uncle "I wonder how you are still alive."
This served as a wake-up call for Sumit, prompting him to make positive changes to his lifestyle. He began prioritizing his health, analysing his habits, exercising regularly, and managing his work hours more effectively. This transformation has paid off, with Sumit still maintaining good health.
I was reminded of this story yesterday while discussing our Cloud solutions with a customer and shared it in the context of our conversation.
Let me draw parallels between Sumit's experience and cloud governance, illustrating cause and effect. Just as every business aims to thrive and generate profits, Sumit also desires success and financial growth. Both businesses and Sumit seek efficient methods to achieve their goals, with cloud technology serving as a significant accelerator. For businesses, the cloud represents both a cost and a source of revenue. Similarly, Sumit views time spent on work as a cost that must be managed to avoid adverse health conditions, which could hinder his career progression. Just as businesses need to track their cloud investments and revenue from cloud computing for legal and auditing purposes, Sumit must regularly report on his work performance to his doctor, effectively manage his time, and improve his productivity.
The wrong things when you are going towards cloud transformation -
- you do not know what you got - cloud resource inventory in use is not visible to members of IT org
- you do not know the latest changes - data is stale (older than even an hour can be problematic for case assignment)
- you do not link resources to business and revenues - without resources mapped to services, impact to business is not easy to establish
- there's no formal record with assigned owners, policies, tags for cloud assets
- it takes inordinately long to get cloud resources ready through central IT
- you are using your corporate card outside of IT purview to get cloud services faster
- you are not tracking costs of cloud on daily basis
- your engineers and app teams can deploy any resource to the cloud, from the cloud console
these are all the 'startup-on-cloud' type behaviour that may work a little and is fun when you are spending VC money, but when things get serious it can mean loss of face for organization if the website gets hacked, lawsuits when data of customers gets leaked anywhere, compliance fines coming with inability to show where money on cloud is spent.
Having a cloud transformation plan with governance is of huge relevance here.
Background about Sumit
Sumit is a great guy no doubt, but he has basically led a life of irreverence to his own health, he's been a great employee, done a lot of innovation and wants to contribute more but with management getting serious now in his company about faster outcomes the window is short and he has to achieve more productively.
What's the low down?
Sumit and his health is basically a parallel to the organization and its cloud transformation journey..
When I (you can look at me as a 'cloud governance' doctor) talk to some IT groups I get the same feeling as Sumit's doctor - "how are you doing this cloud journey without a CMDB, without a governed workflow tool, without good inventory keeping, without cost management?"
What's next?
Email me if you are interested to know more - ram@servicenow.com
Read up on our cloud solutions story covering Cloud Visibility, Cloud Cost Management and Cloud Accelerate for automation here - https://solutions.servicenow.com/ls/2c5dbe1c-0663-450f-b42c-a7e0907534ff/ajhQcefZ3cr0WJD1
Our WWW cloud transformation solutions page - https://www.servicenow.com/solutions/cloud-transformation.html
Did you know ServiceNow is named a leader in IDC's Cloud Solutions MarketScape - IDC MarketScape names ServiceNow a Cloud Solutions Leader
Here's a nice video explaining the overall process - Accelerate Cloud Transformation – innovate in the face of rising costs. (youtube.com)
