Readiness

There was a striking consensus about the importance of organizations grasping their motivations for opting for cloud solutions, making sure business needs match the cloud-sourced solution, being aware of the caveats presented by buzzwords, and having a proper strategy in place. The notions of business, culture, cloud technology readiness constitute the following chapter.

Business readiness

Organizations needed to understand their business correctly, distance themselves from hyped-up trends, face the reality of understanding what business problems were solved by going cloud and the organization's challenges. Grasping the rationale of own organizations existence and the relationship to the market seemed important to satisfy an initial readiness phase:

"You need a cloud strategy before you try to enter it. Otherwise, you will probably mess up, use incorrect and possibly expensive components in the cloud, which are overwhelmingly complicated, and your workloads will be complicated as well. So if you don't have an opinion on that, you should try to evolve your processes, teams, and understanding of what your organization delivers. This is important before even considering entering the cloud because it would be expensive if you do it the wrong way." (Interviewee H)

Knowledge of the business entailed increased knowledge of cloud components. Also, several interviewees emphasized recognition of the motivation to cloud source to be decisive:

"Companies that decide to go cloud must ask themselves why they are going cloud? What are they trying to solve by going cloud? It always comes back to that, whether it's in the public or private sector, cloud or no cloud. What is going to be the impact? How is it going to help the business grow and reach its goals?" (Interviewee B)

"It's more a matter of why you move into the cloud. What is your motivation? In my experience, moving into a cloud-based solution is less painful than doing anything else. Because what you are doing when you merge into a cloud system, it's more or less jumping on a train that is already moving. It already has 100.000 users and companies operating on it, so we know it is working. You do more or less configure it for each customer or each user. You're running a configuration of something that is already running, which is a lot less risky than starting from scratch."

(Interviewee D)

"You need a proper plan, and that plan is not necessarily technical. First of all, why are we going to the cloud? Is it lower prices, higher pace, better redundancy, or better control? It all has tradeoffs. If you want a lower price, you should find someone who has specialized in that sort of thing. If you want a higher pace, you probably want something with services and infrastructure to have autonomous teams that work by themselves using a common set of tooling. If you want better redundancy, you need to plan for it when you start building, so you don't end up routing traffic through a single point of failure or have dependencies. If you want better control, find a managed service provider to help you.

You need to figure out what you want to achieve." (Interviewee G)

Interviewee C complemented the argument of running through a single point of failure by illustrating a Hotel chain customer with guests unable to check out during system deficiency.

With business understanding and motivation in check, it was time to materialize through a concrete action plan and digitalization strategy:

"You need to know where to start, where to go, and what to achieve with this? Are you moving legacy, or are you just starting from scratch and throwing out whatever you have laying around already. That is a viable strategy, but you need to decide on that strategy before jumping into it. Let's use Finn.no as an example; they are doing 500-700 deployments a week. So that is a high pace, but without a proper plan, they would lose control." (Interviewee G)

"Readiness is critical because you need to figure out how technology translates into a digitalization strategy by helping to reach company vision, goals, and strategies. Once you have a digitalization strategy, you have identified specific technologies to help you. If you don't do your readiness assessment and blindly go into ordering many things, hiring many people, starting many projects, sign a blank sheet, and give it to a consultancy company to do stuff for you, sure it might end up okay in the end, but that is in my experience where most of the problems happen. It is easy to go in the wrong direction. You can easily implement the wrong solutions, have security breaches and weaknesses in your setup. If you don't have a plan, there is bound to be a waste of time, manhours, money, and efficiency, so get that plan!"

(Interviewee I)

The affirmation consisted of having a clear plan to materialize the needs and actions of the organizations towards a unified goal while maintaining control over resources not to derail, which is the function of a strategy. People constitute organizations. Thus, for it to change, the people must adjust and adapt.

Culture readiness

Another recurring theme was how organizations should be aware of certain aspects to fulfill the second level of readiness, cultural readiness. An interesting saying was about understanding IT's role in organizations.

Cloud was for IT, but IT increasingly engrained itself in business as usual:

"Traditional challenge is that it was something new, so you had to convince the market, customer, by customer that this was a better way to do it. Maybe I have forgotten all the pain, but typically HR people have zero interest in technology, so they focus on people and value. Servers, database systems, who cares? They have the IT department to take care of that and support them. HR departments are typically not used to buying software. So if it's the first time, you are a bit afraid. What's the right choice? It's a big decision for the organization since everybody will use the system, everybody will have an opinion. At the same time, everybody knows who decided on it, so that you can see the pressure as an HR director." (Interviewee E)

"Regarding the communication on the CXO level, executives will see that the CIO is more available and understands more about the business, so the CIO has to be more business-oriented, which is a benefit for the organization, but it's one big change because in legacy companies or in companies that have not been paying attention, executives will still see both security and IT as just one business unit that runs some stuff and they don't understand that if IT were a part of the business, it would enable the business to optimize more. And that is a cultural change." (Interviewee H)

IT changed its function over the years, which other parts of the organizations could find challenging.

Organizations saw a new trend emerging amid daily operations. Organizational inertia came up as an alternative explanation:

"One hurdle is understanding how it impacts the users of the company and if you have an organizational challenge because some people don't like change. Many people don't like change. Even the customers. If you are making changes that impact your customers, you have to analyze that impact. Is it going to be good for you, or is it dangerous? That's the cultural aspect of it." (Interviewee I)

Another connected explanation was the need for adaptation towards novel business practices as standardization characterized cloud solution platforms :

"Companies need to acknowledge that they must be prepared to change their ways of doing things and processes because they will change. Cloud systems are more or less standard. You cannot get your own coding done. You have to stick with the functionality that is there. you can configure it, but you cannot really change it, which is a bit of a shock for some. That's how the system is designed, so you have to force them into standardized processes. So they need an organizational change to adapt to those changes. It's rarely a big problem, but they need to get their people on board and adopting this different mindset. Once that is done, they are better off." (Interviewee D)

This transformational change into the cloud necessitated acclimatization but also engagement across all layers of the organization and future time orientation to appease cultural readiness:

"Changing from on-premise to cloud is a change, and change is typically a bit scary. You have your infrastructure and your talented people taking care of it. Then comes the transition to the cloud. You might not need that team anymore in the future or require different skillsets. Change management requires a lot of leadership and an open mindset and not just thinking about where we are today and what we are good at but also about the future approach. Taking the step might be a huge thing internally for the organizational culture. So what is my role in the future? Can we do it? What is my input? Do I try to avoid it, or am I in? Can you really go through each stage? Can you motivate everybody? Get the commitment?" (Interviewee E)

Interviewee B affirmed these factors about cultural impact, was part of an inevitable organizational change:

"There is a big cultural change for companies, and that can be a disadvantage. It can take some time, resources, and headaches to get there, but I don't think they have a choice to be honest." (Interviewee B)

The last section of readiness emerged from arguments related to understanding the implications of the cloud itself.

Cloud readiness

Interviewee G expressed an interesting declaration regarding the specifics of business processes relevant for going cloud, which were documentation and indexing own stock before jumping on the cloud train:

"If you are a typical enterprise IT and you have many consultants visiting and setting up applications, you have joined leaves, consultants hired for a short period, then documentation is not necessarily the highest priority or anyone's priority, to be honest. When you move to a managed service provider, at least a proper one, you are forced to document it because that is how we maintain insight, make sure things are running, and handle incidents. If you don't have that and throw it into the cloud, it won't be any better. You would have the same security mess, the same lack of overview.

You will have a platform that enables you to spin up things way faster, so you create a way bigger mess. Start an inventory project, don't just move everything to the cloud and keep the timeframe realistic. I have been in meetings with

people saying they wanted to move huge portfolios into the cloud within three months, and it doesn't happen. It is possible, but it comes with tradeoffs that you would have to accept for a very long time. "(Interviewee G)

Another interviewee confirmed this notion of formalizing processes, assuming control of the business, and described it as governance:

"Governance means having things under control, knowing whom to call when things go wrong, documenting all the deployments, and knowing how all the things are today. " (Interviewee I)

Another interesting finding revealed the need to alleviate the discrepancy between glorified unique selling point pitches and to understand the reality of what cloud is:

"It’s more like moving into an apartment that is already there and just furnishing and painting it with the colors you want instead of building a house from scratch.” (Interviewee D)

“Removing yourself from the buzzword cloud or from the sales pitches to understand what it is and how to utilize the different building blocks. The different providers have different approaches to these components, but they are basically the same. Using these components correctly is essential; otherwise, you will fail, costly-wise, security-wise, and probably disabling you from optimizing your services. You might say the cloud was slower than on-prem systems, and that is probably because you have misconfigured something.” (Interviewee H)

“When analysts of Gartner had conversations with customers, this question popped up. What should we do with the cloud? And the customer said, we can save cost by going cloud; the analysts were a bit skeptical about that and said, yes, you can maybe save some cost by going cloud, but that is not going to be the number one driver for going into the cloud.” (Interviewee B)

“They typically always end up with big surprises because the cost of Azure and Public cloud is very different. You pay for everything.” (Interviewee A)

The hype evolving since 2010 seemed to have persuaded organizations that the cloud is the ultimate cost savior for anyone to use. Still, there was consensus to eradicate this idea. Furthermore, another interesting and somewhat unfortunate finding suggested some cloud solutions that, in its essence, were merely traditional IT infrastructure disguised as a cloud:

“That is somewhat annoying. We arrive as a pure cloud provider with multi-tenant architecture and modern software.

You have a competitor who says the same things with the same words. They might copy it from your website stating they are cloud tech. How do you explain that to customers? You have lost the game if you start to explain that kind of stuff to an HR director. There is no standard for what cloud means, such as different layers of multi-tenancy and the different benefits. But eventually, fake clouds are not getting the benefit of being a cloud system. For us, one investment covers

all the customers; for them, it’s one by one. So we are continuously renewing the software, pushing releases for our clients, and they cannot keep up anymore.” (Interviewee E)

They build top layers on old technology. It looks like a cloud because they can access it through the web, but it’s not born in the cloud. We use the expression born in the cloud. The technology will be very different if you design this from the beginning or build a user interface on top of something old. A multi-tenant public cloud is a real cloud. That means everyone shares and accesses the database in the same way. A lot of these systems are actually single-tenant private clouds. It's very different from a user or customer perspective because you still need to pay for every single upgrade, you and only you, whereas the multi-tenant cloud-like we do is for everyone. Once we release it, it’s there like Facebook changes. It’s the same thing. (Interviewee D)

Despite these comments about opportunistic behavior in the market, it seemed reassuring that their technology would eventually expose players engaging with this. They would not keep up with legitimate cloud market players and the advantages they provide.

The second critical success factor that emerged from the analysis was competence explicated

through management and expertise.