Cloud Migration: Timing and Strategies for Success

Transcript

Jess Carter: The power of data is undeniable and unharnessed, it's nothing but chaos.
Speaker 2: The amount of data, it was crazy.

Speaker 3:Can I trust it?

Speaker 4:You will waste money.

Speaker 5:Held together with duct tape.

Speaker 6: Doomed to failure.

Jess Carter: This season, we're solving problems in real-time to reveal the art of the possible. Making data your ally. Using it to lead with confidence and clarity, helping communities and people thrive. This is Data Driven Leadership, a show by Resultant.

Hey, guys. So you're about to hear from Fred Gottman, who unpacks cloud infrastructure, its benefits, some of the challenges to getting there, how it's different to manage, how it's different to budget for. He kind of lays it all out for you. Here's my take. I think that this is a very important conversation for anyone in leadership of any company. If you don't understand how your technology is serving your business or not and what it needs to do to align to or help your business accomplish its strategy, it's not going to.

So in the last nine years, every single consulting project I've put out for public sector, private sector, any industry, data, technology, modernizations, you name it, required infrastructure and each of the clients’ infrastructure was a critical component to how we went live, how much it cost to go live, how long it took to go live.

And so when you listen to this, whether you're somebody who hangs out in network conversations and knows sysadmins and understands what a server load is or knows what infrastructure as a service is, or you're already serverless, I promise you that Fred has something for you to glean from this conversation and leverage to help your business strategy be more successful because you listened to him.

He is such a wealth of knowledge. He does this stuff in his sleep and he's made a career of it. He's so impressive and his comments are so relative, not just to the IT department, but to how successful your business is and how well it partners with your IT department. Take a listen.

Welcome back to Data Driven Leadership. I'm your host, Jess Carter. On today's episode, I want to unpack cloud infrastructure. What is it? What are the perks? What are some of the cons? How is it different and should I pursue it? To help me solution on the spot is Resultant’s Senior Manager of Cloud Computing. Fred Gottman. Welcome, Fred.

Fred Gottman: Hey, thanks for having me.

Jess Carter: Yeah. How are you doing?

Fred Gottman: I'm doing great. How are you?

Jess Carter: Good. I'm good. You ready to talk cloud infrastructure?

Fred Gottman: I am.

Jess Carter: So I've already forced, kindly, Fred into this conversation. In the past, we've had this conversation, so I had a quick minute, which, Fred, it sounds like you remember where I dragged you through all of my interrogation about cloud infrastructure in the last year, where I was like, is it always cheaper? Is it always better? And so you kind of walked me through all the caveats of, like, maybe sometimes and here's when and why that I just imagine it would be really helpful for others to understand. So I'm going to make you get interrogated a second time. Are you good for that?

Fred Gottman: Great.

Jess Carter: Okay. All right. So the first thing you started to unpack with me, I want to hear you kind of share again, is, like, the history of what was it like when everything was on prem? And then we started to get into this last 20 years or so, this transition into cloud infrastructure. So can you walk me through where are we today, and how is that different than 20 years ago, maybe?

Fred Gottman: Sure. Yeah. So 20 years ago, there was no such thing as the cloud. The cloud was just a puffy ball white up in the sky, running a business. Over the last—call it 40 years—over the adoption of computer systems and housing data and running applications to run your business smoother, more efficiently. You need a lot of horsepower to run all of that. And traditionally, that was all housed on equipment that was shoved in a closet in the back room somewhere. You hired someone to keep an eye on it, make sure it was running the way you needed to.

But over the last 20 years or so, a lot of bigger organizations have seen the benefit of getting out of that space, of hosting their own hardware, hosting their own applications, and letting someone else manage that for them. And take on the responsibility of keeping the hardware healthy, making sure that the power stays connected and that you've got a decent internet connection.

So over the course of that time, something called a data center became a really big business, and a lot of organizations started moving their traditional kind of on-premise server infrastructure into what is now kind of known as the cloud, which is in reality just someone else's data center.

Jess Carter: We have clients today where there's people who have their systems still on-prem, they still operate that way. There's a degree of control, comfort, ease of that predictability and exactly what they're going to have to replace in their hardware in five years. Right. Sort of that world that still exists. But then there's the data center world, and then there's this further maturation of data centers into the rest of the cloud. So how do you walk somebody through that?

Fred Gottman: Yeah, I really kind of came about with the kind of limitations you have with running hardware. I mean, any piece of equipment at some point is going to age out and need some maintenance or even potentially go end of life. And so at some point, you end up having to replace all of that hardware. That hardware is generally not cheap. It's pretty expensive to build out a server infrastructure to run even a small or medium-sized business, let alone a large organization.

So it kind of came about around the times that those organizations started getting the bill for replacing all of that infrastructure, doing the capital expense of taking on a couple hundred thousand dollars to replace all of it all at once. And then you're good for a couple of years, but then you’ve got to do it again five, seven, ten years later. Sometimes you can squeeze a little more out of it, but eventually everything will come crashing down if you don't replace it.

Jess Carter: Yeah. So people then moved to this concept from CapitalEx to OpEx where it's like, well, if we just move to the cloud…you kind of walked me through this, right? You're paying for more of the capacity and the consumption on the cloud versus the actual servers in your closet. Is that right? Am I getting it right?

Fred Gottman: Yeah, exactly right. So when you're shifting your infrastructure to more of kind of the cloud-based model, what you're really doing is, you're outsourcing the management of the hardware itself. You're putting that responsibility into another organization's hands to host that for you. And then all you're doing is reserving the horsepower, the compute resources, the storage, the memory to be able to run your business-critical applications.

And when you're doing that, it shifts into more of a subscription-based model where you're paying for really your consumption, your usage, your connectivity, rather than having to buy out the entire hardware up front. And maybe you might grow over the next five to ten years and so you've got to plan for a little extra, but maybe you end up not needing that capacity later. There's all these variables that go into picking out the right hardware and a lot of that can get a lot easier when you're looking at the cloud. Instead, you're really just subscribing to, this is exactly what I need to run what I have right now, and it shifts it into that subscription monthly based model, that operational expense.

Jess Carter: And so then one of the questions I imagine there's some opinions about or hypotheses about is, hey, it must be cheaper to go to the cloud. And that may or may not be true, right? It's not always true that it's cheaper. Is that fair?

Fred Gottman: Yeah, that's exactly right. It's all depending on how you look at it and what it is that you're trying to run in the cloud. Bigger applications that require a lot of back end services, databases, storage, servers, whatever flavor they might be, all of that stuff adds up as well. And the more capacity that you're consuming, the more expensive your subscription is going to be. In a scenario where you might have additional load, you can see those prices spike pretty quickly. And if you're not prepared for that, it can come as a shock.

Jess Carter: I'm going to get into quicksand here pretty quickly, but some of the things I've observed in my consulting years too, are when there are organizations that are wanting to work with their data more and more there's often large amounts of data that they're playing with. Maybe they're trying to play up scenarios or build out models for their business if you don't have it. People who are running some of that architecture infrastructure building out the data models who are conscious of your OpEx cost.

So if you're in the cloud, one of the benefits, right, is you can spin up some scenarios, some environments, it doesn't work for you, you spin them back down, right? So if you're managing your consumption thoughtfully in what you're trying to build out, it can be really affordable or it can get out of hand if somebody forgot that you don't need that anymore. But we've also worked with on-prem clients where to go spin up some exercises around data models it’s really quite a load where you've got your sysadmin and you've got all your environments. You have to stand up and then you have to make sure that your servers don't get overloaded. It's a different type of way to play. You can run those experiments and they're dynamic, but the way they play out is different. And you may have the same steady amount of costs with your CapitalEx. On-prem servers are here or at a farm, but it's a little bit different when you get into consumption, right? You have to manage it differently.

Fred Gottman: Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's one of the things that we really strive to help our clients understand when we're walking them through that transition. You really can't look at the migration to the cloud as a one for one with what you had on premise. It doesn't work that way. You really have to look at really slimming down and streamlining the infrastructure that's supporting the business and the applications really get to the bottom of exactly what data do we need, how do people need to interact with it, and how can we get them that data the most efficiently.

As long as you kind of keep those things in mind, you can generally find the cost savings with going to the cloud. But if you approach it with it's just going to be a one for one replacement with what I have on-prem right now, you're going to end up finding out down the road that it maybe isn't cheaper than going the other route.

Jess Carter: Right. If I'm just a CEO or a CDO or CIO who's excited about moving my company forward and I have the interest in getting off prem or I want to get to the cloud, what are some pieces of advice you'd give me on how to think about whether I should? What are some of the real benefits to my business? And what does that whole engagement look like?

Fred Gottman: We generally find the right time to have that conversation seems to be around the time that we're looking at having to replace the hardware. And it's just because it's easiest to draw that comparison at that point when we're really looking at, all right, here's what you have in your business. Here's what you have deemed is the most critical to your business operations. So if we're going to continue to support that, running it on-prem, here's going to be everything you need. Here's all the kind of the add-ons and extra stuff or planning for all the growth. And then here's the cloud version of that same model and it's really kind of just walking them through the understanding of all of the extra expenses that come out of it.

There's so many variables that go into it and it's really pretty unique to each business on whether or not that migration makes sense for them. It comes down to I think the most critical thing is understanding what applications your business needs to run and how do those applications work. Some older applications have limitations on how they can run and what servers they can run on and that will be probably the first big hurdle to whether or not cloud is a suitable option. But more modern applications or even what we're seeing a lot of days with clients now is they're moving to more of the cloud-based application, the SaaS-based app where it's hosted. You go to a website, you log in and everything you need is right there. In that case you don't need all of the servers running that and your path to the cloud gets a lot shorter.

Jess Carter: Okay, so that was my next question. This is deliberately a difficult question. So like how fast can I get to the cloud?

Fred Gottman: Yeah, I mean it completely depends. There's a lot of planning and a lot of factors to think about before you can really know that answer for sure. A lot of times what we're seeing is when an organization is getting to the point where they're ready to shift their primary applications to more of that cloud-based model, be it on infrastructure hosted in a cloud service or an actual SaaS-based log into a website and everything's in there hosted by someone else. When your biggest applications are kind of shifting in that direction, that usually is going to be the right time to consider it and is probably the easiest path because once you have adopted the cloud model for your main business applications, everything else that supports just kind of the IT operations and management of the business behind the scenes can go to the cloud very quickly.

It's always the applications, the primary business applications that are the hurdles. So understanding kind of the maturity of those applications, is it actively supported by a vendor? Is it getting regular updates? If those two questions or the answers are yes, then likely there's a good chance that you could get there pretty quickly.

Jess Carter:
Okay, that makes sense. So things have you kind of been keeping up with stuff and it's moving towards the cloud anyway, or towards SaaS, then there's probably a world where it's an easier lift than if you've got some outdated versions of some things you haven't been doing your upgrades. You've got 2010, 2014 things around you that may be a little bit more complicated. Is that fair?

Fred Gottman: Yeah, that's what we call the technology debt. If you neglect some of those expenses over the years, we find that they tend to add up and then trying to get caught up is that much harder.

Jess Carter: It's the nicest way anyone could say, like, if you're not keeping up, it’s still going to be painful to catch up later. Like if we're trying to avoid that, the pain can be far greater later on.

Fred Gottman: Exactly. Right, okay. It's always cheaper to do it up front.

Jess Carter: Well, right. But there are reasons, right? Like maybe somebody was out and they weren't updating some of it. It's always like somebody just deliberately chose not to. If I'm in the middle of on-prem and are there other reasons other than I need to go spend the CapEx to update my servers and a whole bunch of hardware, are there any other reasons why I should think about pivoting before that hardware is due, or largely that's the time?

Fred Gottman: There's a lot that goes into running hardware. There's a lot of expenses outside of even just replacing the hardware itself. You've got to have dedicated space for it. If you've got a lot of the hardware, you've got to pay for the electricity to run it, the air conditioning, everything else’s generally got sensitive data on that hardware. So you've also got to protect it, secure it, make sure it's locked down. Only certain people have access to it, and all of that. Whereas a lot of that, again, kind of goes away in the cloud model. It all shifts and it's all baked into that subscription. The electricity, the connectivity, the air conditioning, the making sure that the hardware is getting replaced on the regular cycle and just security itself is, I think, a lot easier to approach that, really. I think the name of the game these days is making sure that your security forward. You're thinking of that first. And in a world where your infrastructure is running in the cloud, it is a lot faster and easier to get to a really secure environment compared to maintaining it traditionally.

Jess Carter: On-prem, okay, let's say I've decided I want to head towards a cloud migration for my company without outing any previous clients of the last decade or so. Do you have any advice? It's like, top three things not to do right now. So we're heading towards the cloud. Are there like one to three things you'd be, like, for the love…

Fred Gottman: …please don't do that! It’s a good question. There are absolutely some limitations to be aware of before you go making the decision to just put everything in the cloud. There are absolutely some things that do not work as well once they are in the cloud.

Jess Carter: Okay.

Fred Gottman: And I would say, I think a prime example of that is going to be any system that is doing really heavy communication with other devices on your on-prem network. So I'm talking camera systems—your video storage server for your cameras and all the cameras talking back to it with all that video footage is not going to perform as well running in the cloud compared to having the device on-prem. I'd also probably throw caution in there around servers that are running access control systems and/or, like, HVAC control systems, anything that might have a direct tie-in to hardware running on site. It's probably worth a second consideration on whether or not it's a good idea to put it in the cloud.

Jess Carter: Okay. What about all the other things I want to get done? So if I'm a C-level executive, forgive me, but if we're trying to go to the cloud and largely that's kind of behind the scenes, it's behind the curtain. It's not the front stage. I’ve got major procurements I'm doing and huge deals I'm selling and maybe a new application the company needs that I'm out there looking to purchase. Can I keep those balls rolling while doing this huge lift, but not front and center to my business users? Can I do both at the same time? Do I have to juggle or do I have to do this and all the other exciting stuff stops?

Fred Gottman: We typically see that that path to the cloud gets, I don't want to say drawn out, but it intentionally goes at the pace that the business can support. It is not intended to be disruptive or cause issues with just day-to-day operations of the business or disrupting any other business goals the executive team might have. It's really moving at the pace that the business can support. It's moving a server at a time, an application at a time, or really planning for any bigger changes around a season that maybe you're slower.

Jess Carter: Okay. And then again, for my end users, if somebody's going to talk to their buddy and their buddy is going to say, oh, we moved to the cloud in a weekend because their stuff was updated and everything was SaaS and it was easy, and somebody else is going to say, well, we're on month three, why is it taking so long? So you kind of walked us through. It doesn't always mean they're doing a bad job. It might mean that you had some more complicated scenarios that we just talked about. But is there a way to make it clear? Should an end user know the progress of your cloud migration or do they have any role to play in validating that the cloud migration went well? What does that look like for somebody who's just in the business working on stuff that was once on-prem and is now in the cloud?

Fred Gottman: Sure, I mean the cloud is a pretty broad topic, right? So people use it in all kinds of different ways and it can mean different things to different people. It's hard to manage that perception a little bit when the user kind of discussing the migration may not entirely understand the complexity behind the scenes. Right? On one hand you might be talking about moving your email and that's really kind of user-impacting and they're going to notice and likely complain when things aren't going well. On the other hand, with a lot of the infrastructure stuff that can happen behind the scenes a lot of times and they may not even be aware that it's happening. But that's really one of the kind of the big focuses as well as you're planning out that cloud migration is what is the workloads that are going to be the biggest impact to the user and how can we mitigate any of those changes ahead of time to ensure that the change management behind it is really smooth, that they're going to be able to anticipate the changes, know what to expect, and know how to continue running, doing their job after the fact?

Jess Carter: Okay, well this was probably like 101, like first question or second question I should have asked today. So when we say moving your infrastructure to the cloud, what are the top three actual products we're talking about? We're talking about Azure, AWS, Google. Are those the three?

Fred Gottman: Those are the three biggest, what we call public clouds. So they are the big players in the field. If you're going to go kind of reach out and set up a subscription to spin up some cloud infrastructure, there's certainly a lot of other players out there, but they're private or really specifically focused on a certain demographic or industry or vertical or something.

Jess Carter: Okay, and then I've heard—I've been in public sector for a long time—so there's public sector cloud that's different than, do you know what I'm talking about? There's like different clouds. What does that mean for the public sector people?

Fred Gottman: We work primarily with Microsoft and the Azure space, and Microsoft has what they call the consumer cloud and then the government cloud, which is a public sector cloud. And there's a couple of different layers to the government cloud as well. You've got your kind of standard GCC, which is going to be more city, county, local government, gov domains, anyone in that kind of space. But then if you're working with DoD contracts or require some higher level specific security compliance requirements, you might be in the GCC High cloud, which is more a secured, really specific data center focused for American government. There's kind of those unique secure data centers mixed in as well. The main difference between the two is really the focus on security. They're putting kind of a tighter lens on what happens on the government side.

Jess Carter: Is it really called GCC High? Like we couldn't have branded that something more sophisticated?

Fred Gottman: I'm sure they have five different names for it.

Jess Carter: Next one higher, three levels. That's awesome. Well, okay, so you've taken a bunch of my practical questions because I think often there's this huge disconnect, and maybe you've experienced this where it's like IT people who are working on Sysadmins get this for days. They live in the infrastructure. They manage the infrastructure. They know the infrastructure. They can talk about the network. They understand the environments, where they are and the load. And so people who kind of speak that language inherently tend to understand some of this.

People who manage IT or make budget decisions every year about IT don't always understand the complexity here. So I found that there's often a disconnect between the decision maker or the budget generator and the people on the ground who really understand what we need and why. I don't know. Do you have any advice about that? Have you seen that too? Do you have any thoughts on how to improve that theme, or am I wrong?

Fred Gottman: It is certainly something we've seen time and time again. It is IT itself and IT operations and the infrastructure behind it is a pretty complex topic for certain organizations. And the best advice I can have there is make sure you've got an IT director or someone in a leadership position there that's really kind of keeping an eye on that overall strategy and really planning for the future, planning five years out and knowing what that path is. And if the cloud's a part of it, where does that start on your path and how long is it going to take you to get there?

Jess Carter: No, that's helpful because sometimes the frustration I see in my decision-maker clients, too, is it's almost helplessness. It just feels like I keep getting these IT bills and we need it. I can't say no, but I think you're right to tie it back to strategy. Like, are we aligned leadership with IT leadership and management of where we're going and why and what the cost might be and what it takes to get there and kind of doing an alignment exercise would come a long way.

I think you hit the nail on the head that strategy requires some give and take on both parts. Leadership has to tell the IT team and leadership where they're wanting to head and why, what the business needs from IT. I think you've taught me this. And then IT has to say, okay, well, if you want to get there, that does require some changes, or it doesn't have to, but this is the scale you want to get at, or this is the volume, or this is the geographic growth. There are business elements that IT needs to understand as requirements to stabilize and support the needs of the business. And I think if we can get that on paper, I don't know, once a quarter, once a year, like you're doing something right, is that fair?

Fred Gottman: Absolutely. And I'd say something I've noticed even in the last year, just that has made that conversation even a bit easier in helping bridge the gap in understanding is, again, kind of using the security focus to demonstrate why some of these decisions are a good idea or necessary. Because a lot of times that is the one topic that can break through the knowledge gap between IT and the executive leadership is understanding that none of us want to get hacked and have to deal with paying a ransom or compromise systems.

Jess Carter: Yeah, that fear-based incentive really works. Unfortunately, it's a motivator. Well, okay, so I have a couple of other questions that are just, like, quick-fire, but before I do, those are kind of just fun. Do you have anything else about this topic? Questions I haven't asked or topics we haven't covered that we should?

Fred Gottman: I think the only other thing that stuck out was the security, but I got up there.

Jess Carter: All right, so my last two quick questions for those of us who just think that cloud is sexy. I just want it because it sounds hip and I want to be a hip technologist too. Okay. Because there's people exist, right, those clients that just kind of think it's cool. I want to go serverless. I want infrastructure as a service. What the heck does any of that mean? So walk me through going serverless. What are we really saying? And then walk me through infrastructure as a service.

Fred Gottman: Yeah, so serverless is, that's actually something we really try and help our clients as a good strategy. Right, so, five-year goal of getting to that point, if it makes sense for them. That's really just saying that you don't have any actual server infrastructure that you're running to support your business because it's been entirely replaced with cloud-based applications at that point. Okay, so you don't have any servers to keep updated anymore or have servers that people have to log into because it's been entirely moved to the cloud. And not even just cloud infrastructure, but fully cloud based entirely. There's no servers running whatsoever. It's logging into services entirely.

Jess Carter: Okay, got it.

Fred Gottman: Infrastructure as a code is kind of an extension of that as well, where that's kind of a popular buzzword in DevOps these days. But really what it's saying is rather than running this big infrastructure to support all of these applications, we can really slim it down to just running exactly what's needed to support the application. And that can actually be kind of written out ahead of time in code, where if you want to deploy five new servers to run a web-based application, that code is built out ahead of time and you just hit the go button and it deploys itself.

And then as a DevOps engineer, your job is more to maintain that code than it is to maintain the servers themselves because the servers themselves are in an infrastructure-as-code scenario. The servers are kind of throwaway. The servers don't matter. You can scale them up, scale them down, tear them down, build new ones. At the end of the day, it's the code that we're maintaining and the code that's telling the servers exactly what to do.

Jess Carter: Okay, awesome. Yeah. Lots of clients asking, what is that? I want that. Or I had somebody ask, like, I want wireless. I just want, like, no wires in my building.

Fred Gottman: It's a common one these days, too.

Jess Carter: Okay. What is that?

Fred Gottman: Wireless WiFi technology. It's the future. You got to have WiFi in your building. But I would caution IT, because what your IT people maybe won't tell you is that, well, you do need WiFi everywhere, and you do need good coverage in some cases. You got to make sure you got the wire there, too. Sometimes WiFi isn't always 100% reliable, and you need to be able to rely on that physical connection to plug in and maintain connection to the Internet or whatever you're doing.

Jess Carter: It's like a cautionary tale there of some kind, which I appreciate.

Fred Gottman: Exactly right.

Jess Carter: Like, we like fallback plans.

Fred Gottman: Yes.

Jess Carter: For rainy days with a storm. We like if you still have access.

Fred Gottman: To your business. Redundancy is key to IT operations.

Jess Carter: Yes, that's right. Okay. All right. This is awesome. And Fred, maybe just one other curiosity. So you've been doing this for a while. It's obvious that you're passionate about it. I've seen you in client calls where you're just like, there's so much empathy for what they're going through and their unique circumstance. How'd you get there? Did you wake up as a four-year-old in love with IT? How did we land in this amazing profession where you just seem very gifted at it?

Fred Gottman: Yeah, that's a good question. I grew up with computers. I've got an older brother. He's ten years older than I am, and I grew up, I remember as a five, six-year-old building computers on our kitchen table. I've had one in my room since I was probably eight, and it's just been part of my life ever since. As I was going through school, actually, we spent some time working in fast food at McDonald's, and I found in the strangest of places, kind of a connection with kind of that customer service, which I kind of later found was kind of the empathy and the wanting to understand. And those two things kind of merged together over the years and really kind of fell in love with not just the kind of the traditional IT role, but then what consulting also brings to IT where not only are we maintaining your stuff for you, but we're also helping you build that strategy and really using our core value at Resultant to really drive that and help them achieve their goals.

Jess Carter: That's awesome. And that's such a cool story. Things I've never done is had a computer laying out the kitchen table that we're putting together. That's pretty impressive. It's like, maybe Jenga at my house.

Fred Gottman: It was kind of like that.

Jess Carter: That's awesome. Okay, well, thank you so, so much for coming and walking us through what it means to understand infrastructure and maybe moving to the cloud.

Fred Gottman: Yeah, not a problem. Thank you so much for having me.

Jess Carter: You got it.

If you have specific topics that you want to hear about more, please rate and review the podcast and let us know how we can work to incorporate those into future episodes. Thank you for listening. I'm your host, Jess Carter, and don't forget to follow the Data Driven Leadership wherever you get your podcasts and rate and review, letting us know how these data topics are transforming your business. We can't wait for you to join us on our next episode.