Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: Perfection as the Enemy of Progress

Continuing on our five part series, Five Major Pitfalls to Avoid During Cloud Adoption, today we're focused on progress, not perfection.

One of the biggest hurdles we see organizations of all types face, is the idea of building the perfect cloud before rolling out. Due to the increasing number of cautionary tales on security breaches and cost explorations on the cloud, it is tempting to want to take this approach before rolling out applications.

Every delay means more investment in cloud adoption without tangible returns.  No matter how diligently a team can test the security, scalability, and change mechanisms of the cloud, perfection is unattainable. Meanwhile, there is constant pressure from the business to meet ever-changing market demands. This results in more workloads deployed into the existing on-premises infrastructure and more distraction from cloud adoption.

Solution: Build a minimally lovable platform with critical guardrails to enable application adoption and Iterate

Application development teams are the clients of the cloud platform created and maintained by the platform engineering teams. The platform engineering team needs to keep application development teams engaged and ensure the platform answers the feature and timeline needs of the internal customers.  By offering frequent releases, publishing a feature roadmap to align expectations, demonstrating new features and soliciting user feedback, the application development teams will be more easily engaged and committed to the shared goal of cloud adoption.  

The want of the perfect cloud is driven by two mistakes:

1. Treating cloud adoption as a one-off project
2. Fear of the unknown 

While critical security and compliance features must be built before the platform is made available for use, it is more important the initial framework, which consists of monitoring, responses and even kill switches to understand the use cases of the cloud platform, and the vehicle to introduce features in future. Site reliability engineering has introduced the concept of error budgets; it is more realistic and pragmatic to accept some failure and risk, such that it strikes a balance between stability and progress.  More importantly, the cloud landscape constantly evolves; building an engine that supports rapid iterative prototyping before the productization of cloud features can help sustain investment and provide continuous value with the cloud platform. 

I hope that we've provide some great insight to consider as you embark on your cloud adoption journey. If you'd like to discuss how we can accelerate your cloud adoption, without being overwhelmed and slowed by the idea of the perfect cloud before you launch, reach out to our Advisory Team.

Stay tuned for the next instalment of Common Pitfalls to Avoid During your Cloud Adoption Journey, coming soon!

This blog is the second of a five part series:

Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: Focusing Solely on Applications

Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: Perfection as the Enemy of Progress

Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: A Siloed Approach

Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: Ineffective KPIs

Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: Spiralling Out Cloud Costs