Who you gonna call? Cloudbusters?

Cloud market is growing 35% (Gartner, Rightscale) faster than expected and in one year, half of the enterprises are going all-in for the public cloud. In five years, you ARE using the public cloud in some sense and more than 80% is using ERP from the cloud – most of them fully.

More than 70% of the cloud users are not satisfied for the cost savings and 67% are puzzled by the compliance and security challenges.

Cybersecurirty Insiders 2019

Despite that, more than 60% are planning to move more workloads to the cloud. 

Then there are many, who does not absolutely understand what is the difference of private and public cloud? Now you can have all in hybrid, plus you can have private cloud in public cloud and some of the private clouds are hosted at public cloud. Sounds like a mess right?

Specially at the small Nordics, it is difficult to understand what the hyperscale really stands for. Datacenter of thousands or tens of thousands of servers might sound big and capable. Well, it is not. If you have 20 locations on each of the continents, all locations have half a dozen datacenters, containing hundreds of thousands of servers, THAT is hyperscale.

Why the scale matters?

Removing the variable of scale totally changes the enterprise architecture and with it, the business model. Now we are talking about the real paradigm shift. We can forget about the traditional challenges regarding infrastructure, cost and availability and we can start to concentrate on direct support for business. This is why 72% of the enterprises now seek cloud for business agility.

Deloitte, 2019

So who you are going to call?

Call the hyperscale vendors? Nope. They are just going to tell you that their one is the best and why. They rarely tell you what are their weaknesses and very ofter you hear the suspicious “yes, but…”. Usually you need to go very high in the organisation and establish high level of trust to hear the things you need to hear.

How about the hybrid vendors? Nope again. They have invested a lot of money for their private cloud and they are usually calculating costs instead of customer business value and co-creational innovations with pure business focus. 

Cloud solution providers? Well that could work, but they are usually focused on certain vendors, since their are measured and rewarded by the consumption they bring and selling multi-cloud is difficult. It is easier to select just one to lead with.

Hire your own people then? Well, that works for a while, but the person needs to be extremely well connected, continuously developing self and there will be little time for anything else than just keeping up the pace with the surrounding change. That will be very expensive.

OK, I know it is not that black and white, but the fact is, that getting good and correct information in the middle of the cloud-boom is not that easy. It is like crazy 2000 bubble again.

Who is the cloudbuster then? 

It is a company who you can trust. The one who’s business focus and investments are not on traditional computing or business models. Your advisor needs to make their money for presenting trust of giving good advises. The more trust you give, the more you gain. 

Trust does not just mean co-creation, it means taking a risk, investing when uncertain and openly exploring for new options. In this specific case, the trust comes from the best practises and knowledge what the advisor has built and your organisation is willing to receive. 

Who you gonna call?

Call the one who openly shares common goals with you. It is the one who says you need to take more than just one step towards public cloud. It is the one who says you went too fast and you need to take step back and plan your strategy and journey before you jump in to conclusions.