In two of my previous posts I discussed people and platform. In this post I’m going to share six steps to help your organization get started with platform as a service (PaaS). As with any new solution, it’s important to map out the implementation strategy. Whether your using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), PaaS, or serverless, an enterprise architect along with your cloud center of excellence provides “recommended practices.” Agree or disagree, a decoupled component design provides flexibility with scale, maintainability, support and empowers faster change while remaining stable.

At this point you might be thinking, “Is it that easy?” Not really. Like any project, planning is required. The plan should be iterative with 2-3 outcomes and with 2-6 team members. First, identify yourself: are you application development or the IT operations infrastructure persona? For example, consider this blog post that describes Microservices: Change is here today and is impacting our processes. Traditionally, these two personas do not know each other, but they should not be afraid of each other. Get to know them, and working together might look something like this:

Cloud governance is a framework that guides how end users make use of cloud services by defining and creating policies to control costs, minimize security risks, improve efficiency and accelerate deployment. It’s imperative to have good cloud governance because it’s a foundational element to your cloud practice that provides the ability to scale and be successful.

Migrating to the cloud is an exciting journey as it provides greater flexibility to the IT teams for creating resources and provisioning them. Gone are the days when it used to take weeks and months to request resources and additional provisioning from the infrastructure teams. Cloud vendors now provide the capabilities to create resources such as compute instances plus add-on software, databases, firewall groups, storage, etc. via APIs.

The cloud-provided capabilities are very powerful and can potentially bring many inconsistencies and resource ownership issues into the environment.

For many organizations, a migration to public cloud is seen as a technical challenge with a set of tasks that need to be completed. In reality, it is far more than that, with areas outside of technology that need to be considered.

This blog post will touch on some of the more pertinent areas of your business that should be considered in your migration to the public cloud.

Over the past six months, the world has seen an unprecedented shift toward telecommuting and other forms of remote work. That shift not only changed the locations where people work, it also forced a rapid change in some of the tools they use to make things work in new, unplanned environments. This unexpected hurry left organizations and individuals making quick decisions about the adoption of cloud tools, sometimes without the careful thought and planning that goes into other IT decisions.

Unfortunately, cybercriminals haven’t changed their approach. They’re still seeking to undermine the confidentiality, integrity and availability of systems and data. If anything, they’re harder at work, seizing upon this disruption as an opportunity to take advantage of lax security controls. In order to defend our organizations in this new world, we need to get back to basics and increase the visibility we have into what is going on within our on-premises and cloud environments.

Managing cloud costs is top of mind for almost every public cloud customer. I know this because I speak with customers every day who are looking for ways to save on their public cloud costs.

When focusing on cost management, a business can leverage several strategies. For instance, an organization can deploy monitoring and alert tools, or make better use of various purchasing options. In this blog, I explore five key tactics for driving down costs.