The reasons that CIOs decide to make their journey to the cloud vary, but having goals for their transition has been consistently beneficial.
One powerful way in which Microsoft drives its success is by requiring everyone in the company to “eat their own dog food” and use their products in their work. In 2014, Microsoft announced a five-year plan to migrate all its line-of-business (LoB) and more than 95% of other workloads to Azure, a tremendous example of their confidence in their own platform.
Johnson & Johnson has more aggressive target, planning to move 80% of their workloads to the cloud by 2018. Many Hanu clients have set similar targets to move all their IT operations and workloads to the cloud.
Why So Aggressive?
The aggressive pursuit of success always excites and energizes everyone on the team which, in and of itself, makes it worthwhile. Beyond that, there are three key benefits these CIOs are seeking to enjoy:
- First, the fact is that few if any CIOs want to be in the “data center” business anymore now that they have a better option. They’d much prefer to get themselves out of doing anything that’s not related to their core competency. They also anticipate that this will reduce IT costs significantly.
- Second, they see the opportunity to make their business more agile and able to meet market needs and opportunities faster.
- Third, these CIOs want to accelerate DevOps. By removing the obstacles inherent in managing their own IT operations, they envision being able to actualize new software releases in days or weeks instead of every few months.
CIOs are motivated to take all their innovations to the cloud. By driving innovation to and through the cloud, they remove barriers, increase agility, and take fullest advantage of a far more substantial resource set than ever before.
In his bellwether book “Built to Last”, author Jim Collins talks about having “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” or what he calls BHAGs ((pronounced bee-hag). Hanu is very fortunate to be working closely with a community of CIOs who have a BHAG of transitioning 100% to the cloud within the next three to five years.
What is your cloud BHAG?
