Welcome to the Tech Execs, where we discuss new and emergent technologies to help executives manage their organizations. This week is the second part of a three part mini-series, talking about how to move your organization to the cloud. Whether you’re just getting started or looking to take advantage of the latest cloud technology, there are many advantages to be had by the cloud.

The name of this series is ‘Don’t Lift and Shift and Stop’, focusing on how you can continually improve on your cloud strategy, even after years of being cloud first. In today’s episode, we discuss how to re-platform to optimize your cloud infrastructure to get your organization on the leading edge of what cloud can offer today. We’ll be discussing things like automation, DevOps best practices and effectively using AWS Services.

To get oriented, this image shows the many paths you might take to get to the cloud. We’re focusing on the yellow line.

And as you can see, when we move up the scale to re-platforming, our effort increases but so does our ability to make better use of cloud technology.

Critical Questions in Extending Your Cloud Operations

How can we decrease the number of servers our organization must maintain?

Each server your organization must maintain is another set of structural costs that could be eliminated. For every one database, you organization needs a strategy to optimize the networking, administer the operating system and hardware management. But with cloud managed services, like Amazon RDS, you can re-platform to off-load that management and just focus on the thing that really matters to your business.

AWS and Azure are beginning to offer more and more managed services like these to make your organization run leaner.

How can we decrease the number of man hours necessary to complete tasks?

When working in an old-school infrastructure mentality, there is a compulsion to try to have every step managed and man by an individual or team to make sure the process runs well. When hardware and software in computers was more faulty, this was necessary to confirm that processes complete. With re-platforming on the cloud, many of these processes are unnecessary, wasting many more man hours that could be spent on other important development task. Cloud deployments can be done at the push of a button and automatically push to your environment.

Tools like this can help developers spend less time on getting their code running and more time developing it, saving your organization time and money.

How can we decrease the number of hours needs to get infrastructure in a stable state?

In the same vein, infrastructure has historically been a very time intensive procedure. Provisioning a new server would often been a multi-week (or sometimes months) process to get all the hardware and software available for use. Cloud has helped make these steps many times faster, but many teams still feel the need to do things manually. With Development Operations tools, infrastructure can be boiled down to a series of scripts, allowing your team to manage infrastructure the same way they manage code. This is blurring the line between re-platforming and operational tasks, but that’s actually an important point in your cloud journey. Blurred lines can be a very good thing for your organization.

By moving your infrastructure from manual process to code, you allow your team to focus on how to build better systems and processes for your organization.

Conclusion

That’s it for today’s topic on the benefits of re-platforming. If you missed last week’s episode about the quickest way to get to the cloud, check it out here. Next week, we will be discussing the aspirational side of what cloud has to offer. With all the advancements that have taken place, what could be coming next? In next week’s final episode of this three part series, we’ll discuss what the future of cloud technology looks like and how your organization can take advantage of that today.

If you would like us to discuss a topic on The Tech Execs or have a question for us, please send an email to us at answers@thetechexecs.com. We want to hear the tech management problems you are experiencing and give you guidance on how to solve those problems.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

Amazon Connect – Cloud-based Contact Center