5 pillars of a cloud-conscious culture

Most CIOs recognize the advantages of cloud, the global reach it provides, and the ease with which services can be scaled up and back down again. “Cloud is scalable IT infrastructure that enables organizations to respond quickly to market changes, support business growth, and minimize disruptions,” says Swati Shah, SVP and CIO of US markets at TransUnion, the Chicago-based IT services and consulting company. “It enables us to free our people so they can innovate and create lasting competitive advantage.”

A growing number of IT leaders treat compute and storage as they would the utility grid. To them, most of the technology stack can be regarded as a commodity, a layer of hardware and software no different from one organization to another. On top of that stack is a small but consequential layer of innovation that creates competitive advantage. “Your customers don’t care about your data centers,” says Drew Firment, chief cloud strategist at online education company Pluralsight. “They care about value. The goal of cloud is to get rid of that undifferentiated heavy lifting so your technologists can focus on the services and solutions that matter.”

But recognizing cloud advantages doesn’t always mean a smooth transition from on-prem. In the process of moving assets to the cloud, some people use a lift and shift approach without taking advantage of cloud native functions. But far worse than that, a mistake too many CIOs make is moving assets to the cloud without adapting engineering practices to the new paradigm.

What has been learned over the last 15 years—often the hard way—is that for organizations to realize the full potential of cloud computing, they need to build and maintain a cloud-conscious culture based on five key pillars.

Leadership

The most important part of the cloud-conscious culture is leadership. “Start with a vision and accompany that vision with leadership,” says Jay Mahanand, CIO of the United Nations World Food Program. “Leaders need to walk the walk and talk the talk.”

The vision of WFP’s technology division is to stay on top of technology and apply it in ways that help the organization achieve its mission to end world hunger, a mission which won them the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. Much of the work requires travel to remote regions of the world, and teams need to become operational almost immediately. “We want to be able to go somewhere, disperse our service, and collect the data we need as quickly as possible,” says Mahanand.

The technology division collects data on climate change, weather patterns, crop health, and household needs in troubled areas to better inform the organization on how to best address food insecurity. They can’t accomplish their mission if they bring IT assets wherever they go. That’s one of the reasons they’ve adopted a cloud-first mindset. “Everybody now knows IT infrastructure is no longer a challenge,” says Mahanand. “This frees us to focus on our mission.”

Homegrown talent

According to Firment, success with cloud requires a shift from consuming talent to creating talent. A lot of organizations build a cloud center of excellence to deliver early success. This might work at first, but all too often they fail to develop the wider talent needed to scale up the early wins.

Some organizations end up in a trough of despair where they struggle to deliver on the promise of cloud, he says. Too many CIOs think they can hire their way out of the problem. But the trouble with that thinking is the skilled people are already employed. They’re in high demand and the last thing they want to do is work for somebody who’s just getting started with cloud.

“I wish I spent less time migrating apps to the cloud and more on developing people to know more about how to use the cloud,” says Firment. “Instead of consuming or hiring talent, you should create your own talent.”

Fluency in the language

“The foundational element of a culture is literacy,” adds Firment. “If you want to participate in a culture, you need to learn the language. Ultimately, you need to move that literacy to fluency, which is where you spontaneously apply that language.”

The best way to learn the language is through training programs. Organizations should establish regular training sessions to develop knowledge of the terms around cloud computing. But to go from literate to fluent requires hands on experience and shared learning. Best practices should be documented and cataloged — but most of all, workshops should be held on a regular basis for people to share the news on what works.

“Creating a successful cloud-conscious culture involves fostering a learning mindset beyond traditional training, focusing on practical experience like hackathons,” says Shah. I call it ‘learn by doing it.’ CIOs play a crucial role by providing opportunities for skill associates to participate in cross-functional learning, where people develop a common way of talking about the technology.”

Individuals who don’t become fluent will find it hard to get a seat at the table. An organization needs a critical mass of cloud fluency to transition to the new operating model and sustain it. “Once you can get critical mass of the workforce to be cloud literate and fluent, then you can get the flywheel of innovation going,” says Firment. “But it requires a very purposeful investment in hands-on experiential learning to get comfortable with the new language.”

Artifacts, rituals, and stories

Some organizations are lifting and shifting workloads from their data centers into the cloud. “That may be a migration, but it’s not a transformation,” says Firment. “You’re taking your stuff from the data center and putting it in the cloud and you’re not changing your engineering practices. Then you wonder why it’s so expensive.”

An organization needs to rid itself of the old cultural artifacts and develop new ones. There are new ways of doing things, including infrastructure as code, ephemeral workloads, and auto scaling. In the past, developers asked operations to provide servers for development and testing. Now they have to provision their own infrastructure and functions — and when they do, they become responsible for security and cost.

“A developer shouldn’t just provision an extra-large server and then leave it running,” says Firment. “Coders have to learn to work in a cloud native way. That requires understanding terms like elasticity, scalability, and resiliency. They need to know what we mean by multiple availability zones. Developers can still leverage their skills in the cloud, but they just have to apply them in the new way.”

Building a culture is like building a tribe, and certificates are a good marker of the new tribe. They create a sense of belonging. Rituals are equally important. “As individuals get certified, create a cloud of fame,” says Firment. “That’s a great way to say you value people who develop the skills. And it’s an artifact of the new culture.”

Celebrating certification is also highly effective. “Establish a weekly or monthly cloud hour, where people share what they’re learning on the way to getting certified,” he says. “Ultimately, they should share how they’re applying the knowledge and customer success stories. Storytelling is a big part of creating a culture.”

Due diligence

Too many organizations fail to recognize the importance of scrutinizing cloud adoption. Even if you have a cloud-first policy, you should always look at the alternatives. “We still need to make decisions from the perspective of business value,” says Shah. “Some applications have been architected in a way that doesn’t work well in the cloud — and some have limited shelf-life. In these cases, it might not be a good business decision to invest in adapting them to the cloud. On-prem, or private cloud, should remain a part of your strategy.”

Mahanand agrees: “We always look at the project we’re working on and challenge ourselves as to whether a given technology is the right approach. Decisions about technology and whether it’s cloud or on-prem is always scenario and context driven for us. Technology is elastic, and you always have to challenge it. We want to achieve our mission and protect our beneficiaries and people, so we’ll continue to do due diligence before we make decisions on any technology that comes to us.”