Cloud maturity is a journey, and like any journey you should know where you want to go. There’s no single definition for what defines mature cloud practices, but there are four stages of maturity to consider as you plan for your next stage of cloud growth: visibility, optimization, governance and automation, and business integration.
Visibility
In its most basic form, visibility requires you to engage with and understand your environment. As your cloud operations mature, you’ll be able to understand usage in increasingly more detail. Perhaps you start with the idea ‘I want to keep a budget of $1 million annually.’ Initially, you may only be able to understand the cost by account and service, but over time you’ll get to a point where you can track cloud costs by a given project or function.
Optimization
The next step is optimization, which is the process of finding opportunities to be more efficient. Whether it’scost savings, time savings, or tightening security parameters, your first steps will almost certainly be manual—and that’s ok! Perhaps you start with the idea ‘I want to keep a budget of $1 million annually’, start by documenting the approaches to cloud management you find beneficial for use across teams, and from there you can determine if these approaches would benefit from automatic, or even continuous optimization.
Governance & Automation
Setting a goal is the first step on your cloud governance journey, but achieving your goal is a whole other story. Take your annual budget – how should it be governed? You might consider breaking it into quarterly or even monthly budgets, or perhaps you’d rather give managers a budget to work with. What happens if the annual budget goes over the projected limit – how are you being informed of this overbudget and at what cost point will someone notified? You can choose how to define and measure your goals — however, you need the correct governance and automation tools to track and manage your cloud for progress and allow for course correction as necessary.
Business Integration
As you build on your cloud maturity journey, you must make an intentional shift from measuring your consumption in cloud native terms to instead, measuring on your business’s terms — whether that’s projects, customers, business units (BUs), or something else entirely. When you start to measure and incentivize an outcome, behavior will follow. Are you trying to drive accountability and reduce waste? Tracking the cost-per-instance is common metric organizations use to try to achieve this goal, but what you’re actually doing is encouraging the use of more, smaller instances. Instead, you might want to track savings opportunities in order to incentivize your team to act on these opportunities and save when possible. Develop the KPIs that make sense for your unique organization and drive you towards your goals. Whatever you choose, make sure you can communicate the need clearly and build consensus across the organization. Start small and don’t forget where you’re going on your cloud maturity journey ahead.
Next steps
CloudHealth by VMware is here to guide you on your cloud maturity journey. Check out our Cloud Management Maturity Assessment to see how you stack up against peers in your industry.
