Cloud services have been around long enough, and their value sufficiently proven, that most executives and business units are ready and willing to buy in. It’s the IT organization that may be dragging its collective feet. Their objections may revolve around security, maturity, lock-in, etc., or stem from the worry the cloud makes them redundant (and thus unemployed). In this session, we’ll discuss ‘cloud whisperer’ techniques to soothe IT’s fears and help bring them on board. We’ll share real-world stories about staff fears, and how IT leadership worked around these fears to create significant benefit for the organization.
4. What’s Up With All The Fear?
1. “You’re trying to get rid of me!”
2. “I’ll get in trouble for someone
else’s problem!”
3. “AND there’s no need for the
cloud!”
8. Compare Security Capabilities,
Apply Common Sense
“Like everything else, from tax preparation to
cleaning services, it's a question of trust.
There’s nothing magic about cloud services
that isn't true about other services. Does the
person who signs the paycheck of the
employee make any difference in how
trustworthy they are? That seems
implausible.” –Bruce Schneier
9. Put App Staff In Charge
CityofAsheville&CloudVelox
SSL
Asheville Data Center
OHC™ Platform
Web
Microsoft
IIS
App
Micros
Symphony
SQL SVR
2008
DB
SQL SVR
2005
Prod Dev
Microsoft
IIS
Maximo
IBM WebSphere
Web
Microsoft
IIS
App
Micros
Symphony
SQL SVR
2008
DB
SQL SVR
2005
Prod Dev
Microsoft
IIS
Maximo
IBM WebSphere
OHC™ Platform
12. Thanks!
Keep in touch:
Work email: jfeldman@ashevillenc.gov
Twitter: @_jfeldman
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/1jfeldman
Blog: feldman.org (human business tech)
Notas do Editor
The usual intro …
… but Asheville has some street cred:
… among the first to do cloud disaster recovery with legacy systems and IaaS
… been using PaaS for years to overcome the limitations of on-prem infrastructure
- Yay!
- Nooooooooo, not the cloud!
1. "You're doing this to get rid of me!" (Self-preservation)
2. "I'll get in trouble!" (Span of control)
3. "And there's no good reason for it!")
- The stuff I'm going to tell you is all drawn from our experience, we started playing with cloud sometime in 2009 or 2010, we started using it in production sometime after 2011
- Cloud Day 2011
Got a bunch of folks who were using cloud IN PRODUCTION to give talks about how it helped, saved money, etc
Not really peer pressure, but close. ;)
So important to have a LOCAL, pressing business need
In our case, it was “OMG, OUR DISASTER RECOVERY CENTER IS 2 BLOCKS AWAY!”
Plus, we had some fiscal challenges in fixing that situation
Yay, cloud
- Separate fear from fact
Trust but verify
“The bargain” that I made with infrastructure folks: we do an audit, and if AWS and CloudVelox fails, we walk away.
… guess what, we didn’t walk away
- For our DR project, aha moment: Infrastructure ppl don't care about app avail!
- App ppl do!
- For our other development projects, app people don't want to wait for infra spin-up
- App people are VERY close to the business
Amazon.com beat the snot out of Borders (and B&N … and now Wal*Mart and/or Target) because it’s way, way too easy to use
Make your cloud efforts similarly easy
In our case, our vendor made it pretty easy for our Windows-friendly staff
- NO, we're not getting rid of you!
- Bad employees are bad employees. Good employees are like gold
- Culture of changeable skills, job rotation
- Some will make it to the promised land, some will not, your job is to offer a clear map