>> Hey, everybody. Stay tuned today when I'm
talking to Pablo and Diana about
Cloud strategy and how you can build
that cloud strategy for people to
understand from the technical point of view,
as well as your business stakeholders point of view.
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>> Welcome to the Azure Enablement Show.
In this show, we are having technical conversations
with Microsoft experts about some of
the common questions or concerns you
might have when you are on your cloud adoption journey.
Now, in previous episodes,
we covered what the Cloud Adoption Framework is and how
it can accelerate your cloud adoption journey.
In today's episode, I'm welcoming Pablo who
is a Director of Azure Business and Development,
and Diana, who is a Senior Product Marketing Manager.
We're going to be talking about how to think
about your cloud strategy and build that plan,
that is understand both from
the techie person's point of view and
also your stakeholders point of view.
Now, my first question is for Pablo.
Pablo welcome to the show.
How do we get started with
developing that cloud adoption strategy?
Can you explain that a bit for me, please.
>> Absolutely, and thank you for inviting me.
Let's bring up the slide that shows
the four essential steps that we recommend to our customers.
Number 1 is all about defining your motivations.
Number 2 is about defining and
aligning to the organization on the business outcomes.
Then number 3 is understanding
the financial considerations and Number 4 is
about defining those technical considerations
that need to be put in place.
>> Now, in terms of the defining your motivations, Pablo,
what does that actually mean,
and should that be your first step within your journey?
>> It is. It's all about establishing
why you want to move to the cloud.
We often see there are
several motivations that apply at the same time,
so the idea is to generate all of these ideas,
understand which of those are relevant,
and then prioritize and assess
the potential impacts of each one of them.
Typical motivations that customers share
with us are all about cost savings,
scaling or building new technical capabilities.
Once you classify them,
you will be able to prioritize and decide where to start.
There are two common paths that we see when
helping our customers build their strategy,
and those paths are Migration and Innovation.
In the Migration case,
we recommend that you experiment and implement
the first workload in parallel with your planning efforts to
help the team understand and anticipate
any learning curves that are associated with the cloud adoption.
In contrast, when the motivation is all
about innovation then strategy
and planning will require investments earlier on.
This is all to help the organization prepare for
a more disruptive process that will
require changes not only in technology areas,
but also in that processes
commonly associated with technology adoption.
>> Awesome. Now, once an organization
has established their motivations,
what's the next step on their journey?
What should they prioritize next?
>> It's all about documenting the business outcomes.
This is what will help
the organization show results and
set up for success in the long run.
Cloud Adoption requires investment in people and resources,
so understanding the business outcomes will help
foster the right level of executive sponsorship,
the support needed from IT,
as well as the support needed from the business areas.
One way to achieve this is to set up
objectives and key results [OKR's] ,
because by using them,
you will be able to clearly state
the intent and may ensure the cloud adoption's success.
>> Awesome. Thank you so much, Pablo,
for taking me through those strategy steps.
I'd like to welcome Diana into the conversation.
Now, in order to discuss
that cloud economics initiative and
how it actually links to some
of the business outcomes you mentioned, Pablo.
Diana, welcome to the show.
Could you explain a little bit about
this cloud economics initiative and why we've got it, please.
>> Absolutely. Well, we're trying to understand how
customers see their business case for
cloud migration through our research,
we found out that customers usually start with
financial analysis using our public-facing calculators.
However, without proper knowledge,
they could choose wrong options.
For example, if they have a storage solution on-premises,
they try to look for a parody solution in the cloud.
However, there are hundreds of store solutions in
the cloud and they really
need that knowledge to choose that solution wisely.
We got questions like,
what will give me the most cost savings?
Should I turn the licensing on and
how to write, size my VM, etc.?
Cloud pricing is also not one size fits all.
There's some lesser known tips that
can optimize your cloud events investment,
so we really need to educate our customers on
how the building blocks in the cloud are interlinked
and help them choose their Cloud solutions wisely so they can
realize the full potential of
the Cloud and not make decisions in a vacuum.
With that in mind,
we launched Cloud economics,
which provides a rich set of digital content,
highlighting key technical and financial tips for
cloud migration from our Azure experts.
It also shares some best practices on top organizations.
The primary goal of cloud economics is
to help customers feel successful business case,
to maximize their investments and
realize the Cloud value in a granular and measurable way.
>> Awesome. It seems that we've got
some great information that
our customers can leverage to build that business case.
Now, lots of our customers move for different reasons,
their motivations are all different,
but what are some of the core benefits that
they all see when you move to the cloud, Diana?
>> When we think about benefits,
there are two larger categories that
we really can take into consideration.
One is technical benefits and the other is financial benefits.
One thing that is always good to keep in mind is that,
Cloud value extends beyond cost.
Starting with the technical benefits,
when you look at deploying workloads to the cloud,
there are capabilities that came into play that are
more limiting on-premises but more accessible in the cloud.
One of them being scalability,
the ability to scale up or scale out
your resources depending on usage, utilization, and demand.
Second to that is availability.
It's more costly to build
highly available infrastructure on-premises that
is less costly to architect
highly available infrastructure in the cloud.
Third is security and compliance.
Within the cloud, we're always adding to
our security infrastructure and tools that still keep
you on par with what's transpiring with
respect to security threats on the global networks.
You can also benefit from the capacity optimization,
meaning that you're only paying for
the resources that you're actually utilizing overtime,
so your capacity can fluctuate
depending on those particular demands.
During those load times within a business cycle,
you can actually scale back
your overall capacity or scale up depending on what's required.
That elasticity is a huge paradigm shift
with respect to moving workloads to the cloud.
It improves how you actually deploy
provision or liberation resources more dynamically.
On the financial side,
certainly, you start transforming
your overall budget allocation from what has historically been
a capital expenditure or
CapEx investment to operating expenditure or
OPEX pricing models that can be more fluctuating
based on capacity or utilization of the Cloud environment.
You also benefit from the overall reduced datacenter footprint.
Those amortized facilities or
co-hosting agreements that you
have in place are no longer required.
The overall staff productivity can be improved as well.
These DevOps type of concepts
where your operations folks are more focused on automating
and deploying and de-provisioning workloads than racking
and second servers and dealing
with heating or cooling type of issues,
they can focus more on the business outcomes
and innovation instead of the operations.
You also immediately benefit from a sustainability perspective,
which is a benefit we hear more and more from the customer side.
Datacenters that are hosting
cloud services such as the ones with Azure,
we do at such scale that we benefit
from the least amount of environmental impacts.
Overall, by moving to the Cloud,
you really benefit from all those perspectives
well beyond what you're able to do on-premises.
>> Awesome. Thank you, Diana,
and thank you, Pablo, for joining me today.
It's been great to talk about
Cloud strategy and both in that business case.
For everybody tuning in,
please, do check out the description
below where we'll be dropping some links for
further information and stay tuned for
future episodes of the Azure Enablement Show.
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