The most important rule of cloud adoption at your company Cloud strategy

Have you ever played chess? I bet everyone tried it, at least once. I played it a lot when I was young. One of the first books I read many times was a chess book translated from Russian.

The main thing about chess is that all the rules are known. All the available moves are known.

All games have one thing in common. You can’t win with a Queen alone. You have to use all the pieces – towers, pawns, knights.

All these pieces need to move together on the chessboard to achieve a common goal. 

Win the game.

How to win at chess?

I have to admit, I’m not very good at chess. I’m average. It was proven recently when I lost to a 10-year-old boy at a chess tournament at my kids’ kindergarten.

Why? He had a strategy I didn’t expect. It was focused on just two things:

• Move all the pieces forward.
• Take out as many pieces as you can in the process.

I was overthinking it. This kid was nailing it with efficiency.

What does it have to do with our work and projects in the cloud? 

How to win at cloud strategy?

Think about the cloud projects like you think about the chess game.

Just as I did in chess, we often forget that there is more than one piece on the cloud chessboard. We push only one of them forward, trying to win with a Queen or a Knight alone.

You can’t do it.

Instead, you should orient yourself on this chessboard – look at it as if it was a grid. Review the positions of other pieces. Advance with the Tower and secure it, before moving the Knight.

It sounds abstract, but it isn’t.

We have many pieces on our grid. Advance one, forget about the others, and the result is a horror story. Oh, we all love IT horror stories. We collect them; we keep them handy; we use them to make others laugh or afraid.

Here are a few from my diary:

• An entire redundant online portal, connected to the Internet with a single, cheap switch
• Thousands of dollars on a cloud bill, because someone forgot to switch off a monster virtual machine
• THREE HUNDRED people in the Domain Admins group for a single company.

You get the network infrastructure right, but not the architecture -> your site is down.
You get the right architecture but forget about the cost -> money burned.
You add people as Domain Admins, but don’t have a process to remove them -> you create a high-security risk.

What’s the solution?

Don’t forget about these pieces.

To meet the goal, win the game, you need to play it like a chess game. Orient yourself on a grid. Plan your next move. Orient again and move another piece. 

The new rules to an old game

So, how do our cloud pieces move across the grid? How to play them?

Here is my take: I called it the impACT grid.

Why impact? Because if you play it right, it will have an impact on your business.
Why grid? Because we move across the grid, and we need to advance all the pieces together.

What are our pieces on the cloud grid?

• Cloud strategy
• Architecture patterns
• Data and its usage
• Cloud operations
• Financial operations
• Security.

Think of the elements of your cloud approach as pieces on a chessboard

Read the ebook. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. And if you want to know how your strategy looks now, I’m happy to help you. We have some tools for it, which are not public yet.

Just click here to send your question.