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SDI18 A Practical Guide to Cloud for Grown Ups

A cheeky title, I know. Pejorative even. But there's a serious message behind the laughter.

Cloud finance, security and operations are the top challenges and initiatives in the cloud, especially for advanced cloud consumers. But many only learn this the hard way, as shown by the recent 2018 RightScale State of the Cloud Report (n=997).

For example, the Top 5 Challenges according to survey respondents, grouped by cloud maturity:

Top 5 Cloud Challenges

I think this is partly to do with legacy IT mindsets, what the IT Service Management practitioners call "IT's Bad Parenting". Basically, when you invest millions of pounds in your on-premises datacenter, the feeling is that it's secure (because it's in the basement) and it's cheap (because you don't see the bills). Move that thinking to the cloud, problems happen.

This isn't a new phenomena: over two years ago I was on a webinar where a VP of Technology was complaining that "...nobody is watching the finances. And multi-cloud amplifies the problem because all the resources and billing is different...."

At Cloudsoft we deal with this every day on behalf of clients:

  1. We migrate applications into the cloud,
  2. We run those applications in the cloud,
  3. We evolve those apps to exploit the cloud.

We take care of a lot of security, finance and operational aspects so customers don't have to.

The Rise of the Cloud Service Delivery Manager

If you don't have a Cloudsoft to help you, you should get a Cloud Service Delivery Manager (CSDM) in place as soon as possible. This is the person who looks at IT and cloud from the perspective of the business, the customers, the services. The goal of the CSDM is to stop cloud finance, security and operations falling down the cracks (because it's "Somebody Else's Problem").

I thought it would be fun to talk to the ITSM Professional community at the recent Service Desk Institute 2018 conference in Birmingham. I was disappointed that many in my audience couldn't tell me what the bridge was in the title slide, but they made up for that by being passionate and professional about customers and business. Great crowd!

Here are my slides. I hope they make sense, and please do contact me (details on slide) with any feedback - I'd love to hear from you!

https://www.slideshare.net/stevie_chambers/sdi18-a-practical-guide-to-cloud-for-grown-ups

I'd love to hear what you think about this topic, please get in touch!

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