Cloud Strategy First

at ten o'clock my name is Maria Ellis I am a partner development manager in Canada I'm the Canadian lead for our partner Network for our partners in the public sector so welcome welcome to summit 2019 did anyone catch the game last night did anyone see the Raptors lose was a devastating loss for my people but we will hopefully pick it up again later this week anyway just a couple of quick logistics if I could ask you to have a quick look at your cell phones and just make sure that they're turned off so we don't interrupt our partner this morning fire exits immediately behind you at the back of the room bathrooms are located immediately outside to the left and we have lunch starting at 12:45 for any of you that are interested in seeing the keynote after this session and then heading down to lunch we're scheduled in the large halls a and B downstairs and last of all I was sir you can sit there that's no problem at all he can sit in the front row it's no problem and please do make sure that you fill out your survey at the end of the session those surveys are extremely important to us so that we can get better at our summits around the world so with that I will introduce you to rob grote who is leading one of our our partners here actually locally from from Herndon smart Tronics is one of our top government partners we're very excited to have them join us today and also mark Lacroix will be saying a few words with us from AARP thanks everyone the session that you're in is called cloud strategy first so if you're not here for that session you're in the wrong room thanks from and if you're not here for that session just just stay anyhow and please only fill out the the sheets at the end if you liked the session and the clicker never seems to work the first time and it did okay as a as was mentioned I'm Rob Grove from smart onyx a VP of strategy and technology and I've done a lot of strategy strategy sessions with a lot of organizations March onyx has been working with AWS particularly in the public sector space since 2009 so we've had a lot of opportunity to really understand what are the challenges and where there's friction and trying to adopt cloud solutions and cloud capabilities and we brought one of our customers that were helping go through this transformation process with Marc Lacroix and he's going to talk about really one of the most critical aspects of cloud transformation and IT transformation in general so what we see is that there's a lot of organizations that have found that doing something in the cloud can be easy but making it an enterprise asset it can be hard and there's challenges associated with that we've seen people stall during the migrations maybe not having the right expertise not establishing the proper operations model or not having the skills maybe to operate in the cloud really misunderstanding how to estimate timelines and budgets and the security requirements associated with that building the business case in the ROI is challenging if you don't have the expertise and really understand how the entire process tends to tends to play out and there's something that we call being stuck in the frozen middle and this is this is where you've got a top-down directive maybe to move to the cloud and you've got some support underneath with some of your guys that are maybe really gung-ho and moving forward and really want to do something modern in the space and then you've got your middle management that really can get paralyzed and doesn't really understand what they need to do to move things forward and and that's something that we see quite a bit we're going to talk about that today too and then a lot of people honestly there they know that they want to get to the cloud maybe like I said they've had some success in the cloud but they don't know where to start and there's a lot of cloud adoption frameworks out there there's a lot of different processes and and and things that we've seen that have worked and we've actually looked at where the most successful enterprises and agencies and organizations have been with the cloud and then we retrofitted what was the process and the and the path that we took with them and what it comes down to is that organizations really should be looking at transformation in terms of what are the outcomes that they're trying to achieve you know you heard about cloud first in the federal space you've heard about cloud smart where you you know maybe you really want to start looking at the business outcomes but really the tech transformation in general is a is really creating the right lens looking at the problem in the right way and understanding the business problems that you're trying to solve and with the Gartner quote here this is absolutely accurate organizations that lack a high level cloud strategy they wasted investment in failure and and we've seen this we've seen this quite a bit again you'll go in sometimes with the point solution you'll find out how easy it is to provision something in the cloud you maybe do two or three proofs of concepts suddenly you have three or four applications they're somewhat disjointed now you need to make it an enterprise asset you need to figure out how to pull it into the fold but you don't want to pull it into the fold with the same baggage and same technical debt that you have in your existing data center so the complexity associated with what transformation it can be hard just like the you know the Raptors losing sorry happened to be a Golden State fan it's a team sport it really is and there's a lot of different people in your organization that have to be a part of your transformation effort it can't just be driven from the security side or Department of knows some people call them it can't be driven you know just because the CIO wants it to happen and it can't be driven because there's an unfunded mandate that says this is the direction we're going it really has to be you have to look across your entire organization and understand whether there's going to be friction points and really look at what you can do to establish the capability that needs to be in place so we say that an organization-wide well thought out strategy is a key to success I think this is the most important slide that I'm going to put up today so we spent a little bit more time on this organisations that haven't achieved the success in the cloud it's primarily because they've looked at IT through the same lens that they've always looked at IT they look at what they're doing in their on-premise data center and they try to find ways to replicate that in the cloud and they think well at least if I'm moving to the cloud I'm maybe being able to match capacity to demand and maybe save money and and and that's how they'll even look at the total cost of ownership they'll say this is how we did it in an on-prem this is what the cost of storage and compute is this is how we'll match that in the cloud and it's the way to look at the problem there's three lenses to look at your cloud outcomes the first is when you move to a cloud environment everything that you're thinking about doing should be through the lens of infrastructure automation how do I build a repeatable patterns how do I build repeatable solutions how do I build something once and put it in a way that I can reuse that capability and how can I look at infrastructure in the same way that I've got all of this great discipline and developing code over the last 20 to 30 years why don't we look at infrastructure is code in the same way have repositories have reviews big security into it infrastructure automation is a key component of your transformation strategy and this is how you're going to measure your success when you move into the cloud what are you able to do faster now because you've automated a capability what are you going to be able to do and deliver new services that are repeatable that are actually going to reduce your security burden and reduce your operations the toil involved with your operations the other aspect is application modernization there's absolutely no reason to still build the same stacks that you would have built in an on-premise environment in the cloud environment you want to look at a cloud native lens you want to look at new capabilities you don't want to continue to build monolithic servers monolithic stacks don't want to look at three-tier applications and say we're just gonna throw more iron at this tier because that's where we're seeing performance issues you really want to look at how can you use containers how can you use micro services how can you use cloud native capabilities that AWS and other cloud providers have democratized for you you wouldn't have been able to build AI and ML solutions three or four years ago without a significant investment now you have the ability to play and inject those technologies to make your applications more modern more aware and utilize things like cognitive AI capabilities directly into your applications the third thing is anytime you're building anything in the cloud if you're not looking at the backend operational burden associated with that and reducing that burden again you're looking at the problem through the wrong lens operations optimization is from the very beginning when you build stuff how do you reduce the manual toil associated with operations how do you do things at a fleet-wide perspective everything in the cloud is API based everything is has an API endpoint when an event happens in the environment you can trap on that event when you have to fix something in that environment you can then start to build policies code compliance this code and operational run books that can automate how you fix those environments and that's where you're really going to get the biggest transformational benefit of moving to the cloud is looking through those three lenses so please keep those in mind throughout this conversation so what does the clouds try to do clearly you want to define and how you're going to modernize and how you're going to consolidate there's foundational things that you have to have in your cloud strategy that show how your cloud architecture is is going to achieve those goals you're going to have to look at your application portfolio you're going to have to have a capability to to rationalize your applications and really decide how you're going to migrate them into a cloud environment at the very beginning you wanted to determine what are the metrics that I'm going to be measured on by attempting to do these these cloud migrations the cloud strategies can identify a lot of gap when you're going through these process that we're gonna show you this can identify a lot of gaps in how you do business that's probably bound to the technical debt or the the way you've been doing things in the past and it's important to identify those gaps and address those friction points early in the process and then again it's really important to look at success through that cloud native lens so we've come up with our again almost 11 years now of helping organizations and brace cloud we've come up with really three phases that we see a groundworks phase a foundation phase and a blueprint phase the groundworks phase is really kind of important and that's where you educate and engage your stakeholders look at everybody in the organization that is going to be impacted by the cloud and make sure everybody has a common understanding of what the organization's trying to achieve has a common vocabulary in terms of how they're talking about cloud services and not maybe some of the cloud washing things of we're already built to cloud it's in those servers down in the basement really kind of engage on what modern cloud architecture looks like clarify the business problems develop modify and validate your strategy and then ensure the right business objectives and operational requirements are addressed that's in the groundwork phase the foundation phase is where a lot of people tend to skip some of these components and that's because like I said before it's easy to build something initially in the cloud but when you start to treat the cloud as an enterprise asset and you look at all of the foundational capabilities that should be in place when you start to look at those foundational services the boundary layer the Identity and Access Management layer the security components the operational tooling that you're going to use and you build these landing zones to support workloads that meet your your security and compliance requirements you're setting yourself up not just for that first POC or the second workload you're creating this is an enterprise asset and you're able to build a flywheel effect where that second third fourth and fifth application can start to utilize some of these shared services that you've built and institutionalized in the foundational layer and then the blueprint component this is obviously where you're doing the design and you're doing your creating the the the governance processes and the sequencing of how you're gonna actually do your cloud migration now these three things combined really kind of give you like an overview of what the process is and knowing that it's kind of a phased process but more than that and this is where there's some complexity there's work streams that it will happen in parallel and it's not just technology work streams it's not security it's not operations it's all of these things we're going to go through what each of these work streams are so the cloud strategy and roadmap work stream is one that you're going to be working on continuously during the cycle you're going to be initially doing a readiness assessment that's going to help you identify gaps you're going to start to create your vision you're gonna start to put together what are the business outcomes my organization is trying to achieve maybe it's cost savings maybe its agility maybe it's innovation maybe it's being able to deliver more value to the customer maybe it's to increase security in your environment all of those things are clarified during these during these work streams and at the end you've you've created a it's not go through an entire phase sequence and then deliver a cloud strategy roadmap this thing is continuously updated throughout all of the other work streams the the people work stream is critically important you have to understand if your business outcomes can be met by the way your organization is currently aligned and by the skillsets that happen to be within your organization and you have to identify that early because if you don't have the skillsets you still have to start working on training programs you have to start looking at what partners you're gonna bring in to help augment your team to help get you there faster and what changed management procedures you have in place that can allow you to achieve these outcomes and not prohibit you from being able to achieve these outcomes so you'll do an organizational impact analysis you'll do a communications plan you'll do a skills assessment gap analysis and training but more than anything else you're actually trying to motivate and energize your workforce towards those business outcomes and having them really have an understanding understanding of what you're trying to achieve and be champions for those goals that you're trying to achieve governance well this is tough because a lot of people have are entrenched in the way that they do things in legacy data centers and it's important to to note that cloud is a different model obviously it's more of an optics model versus capex so there's ways that you have to allow people to procure and incur cost in your environment and how do you manage and control control that when you have a developer who with an API could very easily spin up I don't know I 5.2 decree size I think that's an AWS size and they keep getting bigger you you have to have controls around that you have to be able to identify what people can occur which cost how it's going to be done and you have to have a framework around your cost transparency and analysis there you have to have you know security very much early involved in terms of what's the boundary going to look like what is what needs to be in place and what are the acceptable levels of risks that you're willing to take and challenge your security teams to not just say no but to say well what would it what would it take to enable this capability and have them provide a definitive way that you can achieve parity to meet the security requirements in those environments and this is a really big component of education and engagement where one of the first things that we do is we work with the security teams and we get them very energized and excited about how security in the cloud and compliance in the cloud are a lot more easily attainable if you follow these foundational principles of being able to manage and monitor cloud services again security compliance there will typically be some shifts in the way that security starts to think about cloud through that native lens when you're using modernized modern applications or newer technologies sometimes there's a lot of risk in their mindset in terms of should we allow the service to be used fortunately when new technologies come out we have in the in the federal government and DoD space we tend to have a three to five month window before those get FedRAMP accredited so we can spend a lot of time educating the customers on this is how it'll be used this is how it'll be deployed and these are the the augmenting capabilities we're going to put on top of that but one of the key things again looking at that the lenses that I was talking about infrastructure automation well that includes security automation embedded in that app modernization that includes utilizing the newer technologies that are available for you for looking at security guard duty is a AWS component that uses machine learning and AI to help understand how your your boundary is potentially being attacked and understand if there's indicators of compromised in your environment it's a flick of the switch to turn that on and there's some configuration settings that you can do to get notified you have to start utilizing these new capabilities when they become available to you and then on the the operation optimization side how do you make security operations less burdensome and less manual and one of the key things is you can start to build policies code compliance is code and have these workbooks and run books that are autonomic when an event happens in this environment this is how my security experts say it should be handled and it's handled the same way every time and you've got the full notification chain associated with that platform and tools many times when we're working with organizations they say here the tools were using in the environment while they work in the cloud the answer is almost always yes they will work the same in the cloud your question should be why are we doing it that way are there other tools that we could use or there are other capabilities that make more sense given that the cloud is an API based environment and a lot of times when you're initially moving workloads into the cloud you don't want to be too disruptive to the organization so you'll accept here's the monitoring tools that we were using before let's continue to use them here's some of the security tools that we used for vulnerability analysis boundary management antivirus etc and we utilize those same tools in in the cloud environment but you want to constantly be looking at and refactoring your application portfolio to leverage cloud native capabilities and look at how can we tie in these autonomic responses how can we build libraries of code to handle compliance security and operation run books and the key also is how do we establish those landing zones and that baseline foundational architecture so new application teams new product teams can come in and build capabilities in this environment that are already in a pre approved manner the boundary is set the identity and access management components are set and it allows you especially in federal agencies it allows you to achieve an ATO so much faster when you start to automate these kind of capabilities and part of your foundational architecture operations we talked a little bit about that with the tools I think one of the keys here is that you're gonna have resistance when you're when you're doing IT transformation change can be hard in an organization and some of the some parts of your organization are gonna be hit a little bit harder than other parts of your organization we talked about security the development part of your organization tends to embrace the cloud it's newer technologies it's newer capability their mindset tends to be more API driven operations can be hard it could be one of the biggest change components when you're looking at your cloud strategy typically they don't have the skill sets and they don't have the resources to know they're theirs they're stretched already to operate their existing infrastructure because they're tied down by the technical and legacy debt that they have in their their back-office they're already doing hero type things just to keep the lights on and now you're introducing a new capability with skill sets that they may not have and they feel like they have to double duty their operations capabilities so it's imperative that you look at reducing their existing operational burden as part of your cloud strategy and cloud path you look at some of the workloads that they're currently managing that their team is up at night trying to fix and those are the first workloads that you're going to prioritize to move to the cloud and you're gonna add you're not just gonna lift and shift the problems they have in their existing data center move it to the cloud you're gonna opportunistically look at how do we maybe stretch this across multiple availability zones so we have failover how do we make this automatically scale when the users come in in the morning so we can have multiple servers and we don't have an impact where processes go down how can we add things that are looking at services that always fail and when that service fails have a run book that automatically restarts that service those are the things that you want to attack first and that's got to be part of your prioritization when you're looking at your cloud strategy reducing the toil on the operations team it's going to give you extreme benefits and it's real important that you're sequencing these things so you don't get pushed back from the operations team that you're actually helping the operations team and enabling them to do add more value to the to the organization versus just giving them more chaos to have to manage program and project management key component uh-huh this is not a you saw the work streams you saw all the phases they all intersect they all interrelate there's deliverables associated with each there's communication plans that have to be done don't overlook the aspect of having a PMO or project management team that's not only looking at all of those work streams and all of those projects and the phases but they're also helping just to helping the organization create a cloud center of excellence and that's a key component of your your people strategy is when we do something right and we build it right in the cloud how do we communicate that out to everybody else to start using this pattern to start doing things this way and that's really kind of a key part of the communications plan and your PMO can help you help you with that so build your foundational build your foundational services to help drive the transformation strategy get that flywheel effect going where you your landing zones you have your capabilities you have your operational models you have your governance in place and you're able to to not just do one or two proof of concepts you're treating the cloud as an enterprise asset you're extending your environment into the cloud it is now a first tier citizen in your IT portfolio and hopefully with everything new that you build everything greenfield you're looking again at that lens of I'm not going to build things the same way that I used to I'm gonna look at building things in a cloud native manner I'm going to utilize platform services when I can use platform services and that's really going to be really key in your entire transformation strategy the other thing is that you're gonna have gaps and there's going to be friction associated with that gaps they're gonna be skill gaps there's going to be process gaps there might be tool gaps there might be security gaps recognize that those things are going to happen and address them in your cloud strategy address the sequencing of things that need to happen to remove friction and that's again when you're when you're building your strategy you're looking towards the business outcomes and you're able to kind of see where there's going to be friction and your job is to help remove that friction so you can achieve those business outcomes and you need to have that comprehensive kind of view across all of those work streams that we talked about before to make sure that not there isn't gonna be one of those work streams that's overlooked that's that's blocking your ability to be successful yeah again create a plan to eliminate silos gaps and pain points and then provide a priority prioritized and cohesive set of initiatives and get buy-in from your team on the priority of those initiatives now one of the things that I teased in the in the description of this session that we're having is that there's one thing that tends to be overlooked and I've hit on it a few times but I really want to bring up one of our customers to talk about what they experienced and that's that the the most critical and often overlooked component of a transformation strategy has very little to do with technology it really has to do with people in order to be successful with transformation you have to have buy-in but you also have to embrace and and have creative people be part of the problem-solving process and that's really kind of key and that's why I want to bring up Marc liquori from AARP and have him give you a little bit of an overview of his experience it's Rob [Applause] so I'll give it a little bit of an intro to AARP for those of you not familiar and then talk about where we are in our cloud journey and what we've done around the people aspect so AARP is the nation's largest nonprofit nonpartisan organization dedicated to empowering people to choose how they live as they age we have over 38 million members in the United States you might be familiar with AARP the magazine which is the largest circulating magazine in the u.s. now passed just passed the People magazine our tax aid program last year helped 2.5 million people file their taxes in 5,000 locations across the United States that was all done with volunteers so you can imagine the logistics and management of pulling all of that together our AARP fraud network fraud watch Network arms people with the tools that they need to stop identity theft and fraud and then AARP foundation I would just highlight helps us work to end senior poverty by helping vulnerable older adults find economic opportunity and social connectedness we're a strong nonpartisan advocate for social change the local state and national levels were fighting to preserve Medicaid reduce drug prices and support family caregiver support bills in states and in federal at the federal level so we're really at the very beginning of our cloud journey we have dabbled a little bit in the cloud I would say we had some proofs of concept in AWS we are also moving to office 365 as are a lot of other people but it was time for us to really think through how do we build an enterprise strategy as Rob was saying you now have to make this the first citizen in your department IT s our IT services group which is where I where I'm working is is it it has to be a stakeholder at the table to drive this change to the organization we had a lot going on all at the same time we had a digital transformation that was that's just started we have organizational change within I either we wanted to take on and then we really wanted to consolidate our AWS instances and start talking about at the enterprise level about how we coordinate that so as you can imagine that's a lot of a lot of change for our people and a lot of transformation and then forgot to mention we also have a legacy data center that we wanted to get out of and we wanted to move towards modernizing our IT or IT systems so when one of the good things to Rob was talking about setting the foundation we had set a foundation and done a lot of culture work before we took on this cloud initiative so that was that was a really great benefit to us because we had already set up the ability the ability to accelerate and innovate and move things forward we set a culture that that valued the practices that lead to new ideas the ability to fail and and learn from those failures we were and those that that had paid some dividends our computer world we won the best places to work three years in a row from computer world for mid-sized companies we're level six we were number six last year and when when you look at the verbatim from that people talk about our collaboration our diversity and the opportunities that we provide so that was a great foundation for us moving into the cloud so then it was just a matter of sort of deciding that we wanted to move into the cloud and that we wanted to do it in an enterprise way so we started with the top we had all of the senior executives take AWS cloud practitioner essentials so as Rob said we had the common lexicon we knew what what the facts were we might not have all understood what the vision was at that stage but we were were had agreed to hold ourselves accountable to taking that class and get through it and understand the terminology and the language and then we had a series of strategy decision meetings with a trusted third party from smart Tronics and and with AWS does help to help us think through what the strategy ought to be and how we should move forward we chartered and transition we chartered a transition team within an IT organization that it consisted of execs techies vendor management representative security people from our network and infrastructure teams who could all come together and help with that change management aspect and be evangelists for the rest of the organization we started to identify at that point that there were some identified jobs series that were going to be there were there were gonna be impacted and so we realized early on we needed to bring HR n so we brought HR in and we started talking about what the changes were that we're gonna happen to the organization were there roles that we're gonna go away were there rules that we needed to grow and they helped us think through what's the organizational structure that would support that what's the curricula that we needed to put in place for certain jobs that people needed to learn if we thought that that job would evolve into something different and and they've been a true trusted partner and then I think the last thing to mention is we we did a lot around communication to get people excited about what was gonna happen once we had a common vision I have the common terminology we have the common understanding of what the organization needs to do to change then we sort of could build out that roadmap we could continue to have communications and you can never communicate enough so we have a lot of town halls we had pop-up topics CIO stood up and talked to people had lunches and breakfasts and and got everybody on board to understand what we were really trying to do and the end result you know as I say we're still at the very beginning of this journey but the the results I think is that we're we have a good solid roadmap that's going to be meaningful we're gonna move towards very meaningful workloads that will be moving into AWS proving out some of those concepts will be trying things out with the organization and moving the organization forward and we've and we're gonna get out of that data center so that's that's a happy thing so I think overall that's the stakeholders have a better understanding of where we're going the leadership is all bought in and that's the foundation I think that that leads to the rest of the strategy being successful [Applause] one of the things that that AARP did one of the I think it was maybe back in October early November they have quarterly meetings and they hadn't even talked about that the entire roadmap was gonna be cloud or they were gonna be exiting the data center but there were people that they that they rewarded that in these large meetings for achieving their AWS certifications on their own and they recognized those people and I think that's really got to be part of the people process is finding the champions in your organization and rewarding the risk that some of these people are taking one of the reasons why I think that they're on this journey of exiting their legacy data center and really looking at modern application development is that they did some proof of concepts very early on where I wouldn't say they were rogue developers but they were ones that knew hey I bought into DevOps I bought into this new mindset I understand the value and I'm gonna create something of value that the organization hasn't seen before and they had rapid success with that and that spirals and that's again one of those really important effects in terms of identifying people in your organization that are willing to to look at things through a new lens and figuring out ways to reward their behavior when they add value to your organization so in summary we talked about it's a multi-phased approach the the groundwork phase was critical with ARP two getting the momentum going where we did a lot on the education and engagement side the foundational capabilities are really where you're not looking at doing cloud as you know one or two projects but what are the core foundational shared services that need to be in place that once they are in place you can get that that flywheel effect that the virtuous flywheel and when that thing starts to spin you have momentum and you're able to more rapidly build a gravitational mass for your environment and sure enough once you start to have critical applications running in the cloud environment you're going to get an adjacency effect where new applications can tie into that data and build new services on that and you can really look at more of a modern approach to how you're going to be delivering and operating IT services and again the those three primary technology advances I'm gonna put one more time please look at not only the outcomes that you're trying to achieve but how you're going to measure success once you're once you're in the cloud you can probably be successful if you want to just lift and shift your existing environment and move it into a cloud environment you're not going to get transformational value you might save some money on CPU and storage you might be able to better match capacity to demand but if you want to change the way IT services are delivered and be like the most effective organizations in the world that have embraced these these advances then you're going to be looking at everything through the lens of infrastructure automation building repeatable patterns building solutions that your organization can rapidly deploy and redeploy I mean think about how many times you've had staging environments dev environments pre prod environments prod environments those should be push-button and how you actually matriculate code and data across that should be the same kind of pipeline activities you have to be thinking of that mindset when you're moving into the cloud AB modernization there's again all of these new services and capabilities I want to say it's 4,000 services that AWS has introduced in the last two and a half years no chance you're utilizing all of those but you have the ability to leverage some of these capabilities that have been democratized for your use again AI kubernetes machine learning IOT guard duty look at just even platform services there's no real reason to build out your own database infrastructure anymore when you can leverage platform as-a-service capabilities on the AWS platform and then operations optimization if you don't focus on reducing the toil and your and the the manual inputs involved with operations you're not going to scale effectively you know the way to scale effectively is really look at it through that same lens of everything I do can be codified everything I do can be repeatable I can build these run books that's all I have for today we left 12 minutes for questions mark will come up also and an answer if you have any but thank you for being here I hope it was informative and if it wasn't please don't fill out your card oh [Applause] there's got to be some questions on strategy yeah do we we bring in a mic to them or up right in the center does it Mike I just had a question about how you keep some of the plans and some of these more high-level documents salient throughout the change process we run into issues where we develop you know very intricate change plans but they go somewhere and die and how do you how do you keep revisiting them how do you you know make them something that is constantly referred to constantly you know updated and just kept relevant yeah that's a really good question there's there's a lot of good third-party collaboration tools that we use as the repositories that we kind of enforce that mindset so I think with AARP we use JIRA pretty effectively and it was I think it was really one of the first times that you guys have used JIRA at that level of management where everybody could see the changes everybody could have inputs right on the page you could see everybody's response associated with that we knew when we need to have an education session where there would be some people would say hey wait I need clarity what does this mean to the organization and then we would set up you know a Wednesday session for an hour or two and say here's what this means here's why it's a little bit different here's how you did an on premise environment and this is why we have to have a new process to to govern this a lot of organizations the change management component and those documents are legacy documents and in a new environment where you're actually trying to do app modernization infrastructure automation they're living documents and you want to constantly revisit them you want to make sure that your developers and your security and your operations team really understand how tightly they're integrated now and that's a that's really a key component to to the strategy's really having that readily available and easily accessible and not just in some library for some check off for you know and audit down the down the line I thought I saw a hand over there well I can see that people probably want to run over to the to the keynotes but if there's any questions again we have Tim it okay you could shout and I'll repeat your question how's that yes correct yeah so so we created templates for them to be able to upload the user stories and epics associated with that and that actually helped clarify what we were trying to accomplish so the question was you know were you actually using somewhat of an agile process to be able to get to to get through the transformation the answer is yes yeah where did we say the question was where did we set up the document repository I I think we probably bought it as a service right I think we used software service for JIRA I'm not sure if we actually you can stand up your infrastructure on AWS and utilize it there but I think we actually used the the SAS version but yes you could you could set it up there the question was how how much of what percentage of operations is in the cloud it's still we just had our kickoff with smart Ronix to move 30 some workloads in to AWS last week and how many the digital business platform is still on AWS maybe three or four different applications no yep some of their a portion of their critical applications but they're the major bulk load bulk of workloads is going to happen over the course of the next two to three months we're hosting some some of our ARP org content is hosted on AWS already so it'll be a consolidation with a complete exit right yeah yeah turn off the lights that's yeah exactly oh sorry the lights so the question was that he gleaned from the presentation that there's some hidden costs in moving to the cloud I'll challenge it by saying there's a lot of hidden costs in the way we do IT currently and that more effectively so it's an it's important to when you're when you're doing a total cost of ownership again that's one of the the key deliverables here you have to look at every aspect of how you're running IT currently what's your vendor management process looks like which a procurement process which your licensing what your data center cost are I mean there's there's any extensive list of things that we actually go through when we're helping organizations think through the TCO model and then when we look at how those will be run in the cloud again you're not just looking at CPU and storage and just just managing it that way you're looking at I'm gonna have to make an investment and change the way that I automate security operations change the way that I handle policy and compliance is code and that's gonna take some time and that's going to be part of an investment proposal that you have to make to your organization but you you state that once you've made this commitment to building these capabilities that you're going to be able to save money down the line build services faster have more repeatable solutions and one of the things especially for federal organizations you're gonna be able to get to your ATO status much quicker when you have all of these things codified I've been through a ton of FedRAMP and federal ATO processes or even just in the commercial space whatever model that they're using for auditing their environments when you take this approach to looking at managing your IT infrastructure you're reducing that security authorization burden significantly yes sir Hunter's did you run into when you were migrating from your legacy data centers to the cloud in terms of either you ran into unintended audit problems or you had some sort of challenge that you didn't anticipate and this is more for AARP but just curious to hear what your thoughts on network I think you know if anybody who has a legacy datacenter has a complex ecosystem of vendors and people that are helping out you know whether they're organic resources or vendors that are working in that data center so that's one of the big big issues that you have to face is how do you transition off of those contracts or how do you transition to something different so I think that's that's one of the immediate ones that comes to mind right away yeah there's an untangling all of you know the disposal of everything the thing that you just bought last week because you were at the end of life and you know you had no choice and now you've got to write down you know yeah you know as as an IT architect for 20 years I know I built bad systems right lazy systems whatever and I'm sure a lot of us could possibly be guilty of that in this room and when now you have to move it to a more modern platform some of those things get exposed pretty easily right we've seen applications written that'll have IP address affinity versus DNS affinity makes it harder to move sometimes it's in the code sometimes the people who built that code are no longer around and you have to then look at alternative means of moving solutions I gave a presentation last week on how do you look at legacy systems sometimes when you're when you have when you're looking at migrating to the cloud and looking at doing things with the binary equivalents and that's why I think the VMware cloud on AWS is a is a good solution for some of that older technical debt to move over as is into the environment where you'll have binary equivalents on the other side same IP address space same controls same everything same licensing in that environment and again when you're looking at your entire application portfolio and you're doing rationalization that's where you have to go do I refactor this application or do I let it sit as is until it sunsets and that's that's a challenging component but it has to be part of your strategy you have to look at what is my decision framework for deciding if I'm gonna actually invest money and refactoring this when I move to the cloud and in a lot of cases we found that you can do opportunistic refactoring where maybe you can use a path service like RDS for for database services maybe you can use an existing load balancer in AWS and be able to scale up across multiple regions to get availability those are the things that have to be well thought out with your strategy the whole app migration factor in that process well a lot of times what you're trying to do is make it so the end user is unaware of the location of the services there shouldn't be changed to the end user yeah so the question was when you're when you're refactoring applications in your you're changing the user experience what are the components that you have to think through and again you don't want to be disruptive to your organization's so you have to have those training plans that that has to be part of your your framework as well and that's part of the communication plans this is what's changed this is how you're going to be utilized in the service and even for AARP that's going through a major office 365 move that's a change that's a it's a different way of being able to look at consuming you know office based services and there will be some of that with the cloud there'll be new new services new capabilities new UI's new features and hopefully the end users will start to see more and more features added in a much more rapid pace with this new model of looking at at cloud solutions we've actually created a tech adoption group that specializes in helping people so office 365 is an example so back in the old back in the days when you had word processors people hit return at the end of every line and word right they sub optimize the system they didn't take advantage of the capabilities that were already there so as you moved to office 365 and you can access your information from anywhere and you have cloud based services there's there's capabilities to collaborate and share files and work together that people don't even know about they're still trying to use office 365 the same way that they used to so by having a tech adoption group that's looking at that they can find that capacity that's untapped that the organization isn't taking advantage of quite yet we've them in we've reserved space we've run out of time but I'm gonna be up here for a bit if anybody has questions they want to just come up and ask me directly thank you guys very much for your time again please fill out the the surveys or not thank you

Channel: Amazon Web Services

Views: 4,214

Rating: 4.826087 out of 5

Keywords: AWS, Amazon Web Services, Cloud, cloud computing, AWS Cloud

Id: MVmMjIxLDXM

Length: 50min 26sec (3026 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2019