Simplifying and Driving Cloud Adoption. A journey to make learning about cloud easier.

During the best part of 2013 and early 2014, we embarked on a journey to make learning about cloud easier. Although significant progress has been made across the world in driving access to information via the Internet, my travels across Africa has left me in no doubt that a lot remains to be done.

At CloudClinique.com, we have a simple objective — making cloud best practices more accessible, while simplifying the learning experience. Through our partnership with the Cloud Credential Council (www.cloudcredential.org), we are bringing certification skills to professionals across the world, particularly in regions which were previously beyond reach due to inadequate infrastructure. To achieve our goal, we have focused on breaking down a complex subject into what we believe matters most, designing a delivery mechanism that focuses on building an understanding of best practice concept and the confidence to act on the knowledge.

As we set out to achieve this, we explored various aspects of cloud. In my view, good governance is the key to successful cloud adoption. What is this thing called Governance? Governance is about having a clear vision, effective processes, skills and the organizational structure to drive cloud adoption and innovation within the enterprise. We have compiled a set of best practices for driving cloud adoption. We suggest approaches for creating a compelling cloud vision, while ensuring alignment between business and IT. Governance is about achieving a desired outcome, so best practices on measuring business value are a key consideration.

Many of the clients in the markets we are engaged in are at a very early stage of cloud adoption. Some are currently engaged in building out their data centers. In our experience, alignment of the business and IT is critical at this early stage. There has to be a clear understanding and agreement on the capabilities that should be moved to the cloud, and the expected benefits. Moving to the cloud requires making tradeoffs and prioritizing applications and services based on funding and resources available. And we have not addressed one of the greatest challenges, overcoming the cultural barriers. Over time, organizations have by necessity been built around political empires. To implement projects successfully, specialists with deep subject matter knowledge where needed to design, build and operate IT systems. This led to turf wars, with departments such as security, networking, storage etc, closely guarding and controlling their business. Convincing these entities to embrace the change that cloud brings can be a challenge, so understanding best practices to addressing such challenging issues can make the difference.

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