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Five Steps to Cloud Choice Confidence nellmarie.colman Tue, 07/07/2020 - 13:03 In-house cloud tech competency is on the rise. So why is cloud choice confidence on the decline? Find out why and learn how to position yourself to make continual IT choices, fast and transform business-as-usual. Why choosing cloud services is like choosing your shirt Making the right cloud service choices is important. But its tricky. To explain what I mean, lets start with an analogy. Heres why choosing cloud services is like choosing your shirt: You need to think about making the right choice every day.Yesterdays shirt may not smell so great. You need to get into good routines that enable you to make and act on that choiceUp, shower, iron and at em! More people may be left unimpressed by your choice than agree with it.Fashion or style? Form or function? Despite a lack of consensus, you must choose anyway. Turning up to work shirtless can be professionally catastrophic (even at cool places like Rackspace Technology). Its not the same as choosing your friends, TV, fridge or traditional servers.Choose those well and they should last for years. To put it another way, last year two leading industry analysts surveyed that CIO/CTO platform choice confidence (i.e., they know where they are going to put their apps for the next two years) is less than half what it was four years ago. On the face of it, this seems incongruous as there are hundreds more really viable platform configuration options than there were four years ago (public, private, VM, Kubernetes, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS etc.). Not only are there lots of viable platform options, in working with many different cloud customers as a solutions leader at Rackspace Technology, its clear that in-house cloud tech experience, familiarity and competency has increased significantly in the last one-to-two years. Our customer partnerships are now far more interactive, complex and sophisticated as a result. So with more options and know-how, why is (cloud) platform choice confidence decreasing? Consider going to an exciting new restaurant for lunch and you have limited time to choose from a menu with new and unusual things on it. The dishes sound all kinds of delicious, but youve got a number of questions like: what are these weird ingredients? What do they taste like? Do they even go together? Sometimes we all have this dilemma, right? So would adding more items to the menu help you choose faster? Would having more of your dining guests discuss their favorite dish help you? Possibly, but probably not. If were struggling to choose what we really want to eat, we might apply some simple criteria: what major food groups and calories should I eat? What am I having later or tomorrow? What goes nicely with a certain dessert or wine I know or really want to try? Its important to set a few genuine criteria to help us choose quickly, and well. Whereas just reading the menu for inspiration, and then hoping a conclusion will come, often leaves us bamboozled by the gastro marketing of all the discreet ingredients and their provenance. Its hard to order what we want or need to eat this way. Or perhaps we just order the thing most like the thing we had last time which was fine but can leave us feeling like it wasnt worth spending the money. Does this sound anything like choosing platform services in your organization? Research and experience show that for many organizations, theres a good chance you may feel like making choices between cloud platforms can be very similar. As technology leaders, we must seek out new technology service benefits without knowing the tech intimately. We must listen to our incumbent staff and expertise. We must be mindful of industry trends and other companies experiences. We need to believe that our choices are not only good for our business but justifiable to our peers and customers. IT leaders now face an unprecedented challenge, where such a range of platform tech options changes so frequently that just being familiar with the menu or some of the ingredients often doesnt result in the ability to make the best choices. The usual information channels (sales, marketing, word-of-mouth, influential techs, proofs of concept, white papers) and decision-making inputs (cloud centers of excellence, tech evangelists, procurement targets) often lead us into long term commitments that we struggle to adapt later. We are at risk of making choices that only really meet a certain silo of requirements. Even worse, the pace of cloud evolution means that choice will be harder to justify a year later when an appreciably better looking option appears. We may have just made a very stiff rod for our backs in 12 months time or so. How to make better cloud choices? Our customers who are acing enterprise cloud consumption in even a handful of ways get this, and their inspirational leaders in technology platforms have made some deep changes in IT requirements management, and the operations that support decision-making and monitoring processes. This prepares them to make good business IT choices fast, but also to be hyper-ready to make continuous choices and change their business-as-usual. How? Its not really answerable in a blog, but some consistent observations include: They dont just keep the lights on in legacy IT, but aggressively optimize incumbent core business services to retain business performance with reduced leadership interventions. In doing this they can extend their influence and improve cashflow to invest in cloud ops and evolve. This can be hard, as it requires new energy spent on old stuff, often with some tough legacy IT choices. They build really strong relationships with internal and external customer bases so they can be sure of what those consumer group priorities really are for an application or data platform. This can be hard, as often their market demands are totally out of kilter with the tech, IT ops and IT incumbency-change realities. It is also often a very non-IT discussion which is often not why IT leaders work in IT at all. With laser focus they map those demands to not just the functional, but the often deprioritized empirical non-functional or service requirements (NFRs). They then continuously re-validate these via some form of platform service catalog review process. This up-to-date superset of NFRs must inherit an explicit or implicit priority because next comes the really hard bit of making delivery priority calls and possibly stakeholder compromises. They make decisions based on the platform consumer, budgetary and board priorities for the next 3-6 months. To many enterprise IT operational leaders, this can sound very short term, but having the efficient governance to operate at this cadence is fundamental. Whether its targeting cost savings, compliance/approvals, security or time to deploy, businesses will have weighted priorities at the top level that will be of esoteric importance at any point in time. And these priorities can change pretty quickly: priority development is why ma

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