To the Cloud

My big project this year was to move our corporate email to Exchange Online, part of the Office 365 suite of services. That was last summer. Overall the project went well and supported the divestiture of our company from our previous owner. There have been some other challenges along the way, but it's been tremendous in making email more easily available to our employees worldwide while simultaneously lowering the costs to provide and manage email.

Moving email to the Exchange Online was just part of our move to the cloud. Certain of our products were moved as well, presenting their own challenges, but overall removing a great load off our network and server infrastructure.

The key challenges in moving to the cloud are process, not technology. Cloud services always involve another party - the cloud providers. Any service built in the cloud requires solid communication between the provider and your IT staff. However, even with good communication, having processes updated to account for that information is equally important. When customers report issues or outright outages, being able to trace the cause means your people and the cloud provider need to be tightly coordinated.

If you have another party involved, such as an outsourced service provider, this becomes even more complicated. Customer calls with Problem X. The service desk diagnoses the issue as being with your service. They escalate to the service operator - who then checks logs and sees performance volatility. Is it traffic volume? A bug in the application? A security breach? Or, is your cloud services provider experiencing issues?

Engineers tend to either run down a path of building new services without a support model, or working in deep silos where cross-functional visibility is extremely limited. In Information Technology, there's a tendency to patch processes to connect dots but not four.

Overcoming procedural and communication barriers is a challenge for any organization, but is critical in moving to the cloud.

Name-Dropping

Pretty succinctly describes why dropping a superior's name isn't a great way to get things done.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141206170559-1510816--john-said-why-name-dropping-is-cheating?trk=tod-home-art-list-small_1