Building a Cloud Operations Culture in Your Business is Key to Success

The near-ubiquitous private or public cloud is the destination for massive numbers of businesses. From startups to SMBs and enterprises, cloud represents the way to operate efficiently, with cost-effectiveness and scalability key drivers for business leaders. The journey to that destination requires each business to fine-tune its operations and set user expectations to work in harmony, with a cloud-first culture helping deliver overall success.

Businesses evolve constantly at various speeds, but the drama of the last few years has seen seismic upheavals for many. Early adopters and smart leaders identified the benefits of the cloud long before the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many more scrambled to adopt cloud services during the crisis to deliver remote working, improve collaboration, and drive cost savings.

But the chaos of this time highlighted many examples of how not to do cloud. A mix of point solutions used together helped many businesses survive, but post-COVID, a more fluent narrative around cloud emerged, one more focused on long-term goals and results, driven by a coherent operational culture designed to capitalize on the tools at the disposal of any business.

The future belongs to the data-driven

Moving from what's now to what's next starts with modernizing the digital core of your business.

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The culture of the new cloud

It is hard not to feel envious of a fresh startup. With a cloud-first or cloud-native strategy, they have endless successful templates and best practices to pick from as they create a working environment. They can base this environment around the best cloud platform that enables them to scale up and grow in whatever market they operate. For them, vertical or market-specific cloud tools for all-digital businesses, manufacturers, service providers, or retailers are all ready-to-wear. For other companies, it will be crucial to store data in the country, or even the building. A production company can be forced to keep production data for 20 years locally in the company. The data compliance will force them to have a private cloud - a nimble data center through simplification, consolidation and automation - delivered as a service.

When a business with legacy operations decides to migrate to or adopt the cloud, it creates complexity while giving the leadership the opportunity for something greater than a makeover or a minor reorganization. To really succeed, a cloud-first strategy and a focus on intelligent infrastructure is vital to getting support and delivering an ongoing project.

Moving to the cloud requires this cloud mentality, which needs to be ingrained within the business before or as the cloud tools are turned on. Setting the business to think cloud in cultural and operational terms delivers the best in terms of value, competitive advantage, customer experience, and operational performance. To deliver success through a cloud culture, leaders and workers need to:

Aim to work smarter, while a faster pace helps
Improve processes and tasks, not maintain the status quo
Focus on the end result, not specific processes or functions
Empower individuals and teams to use the tools at their disposal
Be prepared for the regular improvements cloud products deliver
Educate everyone at all levels, from onboarding to every update

For the business, data becomes the driving force behind cloud success, and it must:

Focus on moving all data to the cloud, eradicating silos (this can be done via data fabric)
Use cloud services to produce live reports and deliver valuable insights
Understand how to gain value from cloud dashboards and analytics
See how data from partners can improve business performance (via the cloud)
Be ready for AI and machine learning tools that deliver further insights

Based on that, the company’s IT team and leadership must:

Pick the right cloud service or solutions for the business
Ensure security, backups, and cloud safety function across all areas of the cloud
Share the cloud roadmap widely and meet the company’s expansion goals
Any new tools align with business goals and are easy to integrate

Private cloud eliminates the silos between storage teams, network teams, and compute teams. When moving to the public cloud, avoid new silos between different public cloud vendors. Private hybrid-cloud from Hitachi Vantara and VMware can eliminate this.

Private hybrid cloud also takes care of the aforementioned security and safety functions. It provides collaboration between dev teams, operational teams and security teams when developing new cloud native applications.

The cloud reality on the ground

With all those ambitions, the truth is that no company will immediately foster the necessary cloud ethos at the first time of asking. There will be leaders and workers who do not appreciate or value the benefits of the cloud. But as part of the cloud adoption process, especially a smooth, well-managed one, most people can be won over.

To deliver on the promise of the cloud, most businesses move their easy-wins to the cloud (productivity apps, back-office functions and development tools) first to get the ball rolling. These are followed up by the more difficult tasks of converting any specialist or bespoke apps, and finally transferring any siloed apps into the cloud era.

With that achieved, businesses have a firm base with which to embrace the cloud future. They can deliver the flexibility to scale, adopt new technologies that deliver business benefits and get ready for the AI/machine learning avalanche of features that will deliver business intelligence, smart virtual agents, deep learning systems, and other benefits.

If all of this sounds exciting, it is: businesses around the world discover the value of the cloud in many ways, and their enthusiasm or results drives further adoption across markets or up and down ecosystems, across partnerships and supply chains. Whatever the cloud vendors say, it is those end results that prove the success of the cloud.

Even so, with what can seem like such a complex effort ahead of them, many businesses are reluctant or averse to cloud adoption. They worry about their data, which is where we at Hitachi Vantara can offer cloud modernization consulting services and cloud data management solutions to support cloud efforts, through data modernization and protection.

Whatever your business ambitions or goals, the cloud has much to offer, and preparing any company to adopt it is not as daunting as it sounds. Whatever cloud applications your company needs, they can be integrated and customized to deliver business results.

Additionally, whatever the 5G, blockchain, AI, and quantum computing future has to offer will be easier to adopt via the cloud than for any company sticking to its on-premises legacy operations.

If that sounds intimidating, the simpler values of the cloud, including reduced energy footprints, better ways to share data, and easier scaling for headcount and expansion tick just as many boxes for IT leaders, CIOs, and other key roles.