1. Be prepared to deal with old legacy systems
Landon Williams, vice president of Infrastructure Architecture and Services at The Weather Company, the parent company behind The Weather Channel, weather.com and Weather Underground. Williams said his company has migrated 80% of its services and apps to the cloud. Now they are facing the really hard part – that last 20%.
2. Don’t repurpose old hardware
Tom Soderstrom, chief technology officer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, warned conference attendees not to bring their old hardware into a new private cloud.
3. Don’t screw up something critical
Soderstrom said that some IT leaders want to jump into the cloud with their biggest, shiniest app or service. Just don’t. Start with something small.
4. Don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis
Stephen Orban, the head of enterprise strategy at AWS and the former CIO and global head of technology at Dow Jones & Co., said he too often sees enterprises get stuck in the planning stages. Mired in spreadsheets, plans and what-ifs, they never get out of the starting gate.
5. Don’t neglect a strong network connection
Eric Geiger, vice president of IT operations at Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago, said IT leaders need to make sure they have a good network connection.
6. Code once, deploy twice
Ariel Kelman, vice president of worldwide marketing at AWS, warned that IT managers need to make sure that they’re coding as efficiently, across networks, as they can.
7. Moving to the cloud will be harder without the right people in the right jobs
John Trujillo, assistant vice president of technology at Pacific Life Insurance Co., said figuring out what jobs won’t be needed, who can take on new roles and who needs more training will be key to a clean migration and cloud run. |