5 pillars of a cloud-conscious culture

Most CIOs recognize the advantages of cloud, the global reach it provides, and the ease with which services can be scaled up and back down again. “Cloud is scalable IT infrastructure that enables organizations to respond quickly to market changes, support business growth, and minimize disruptions,” says Swati Shah, SVP and CIO of US markets at TransUnion, the Chicago-based IT services and consulting company. “It enables us to free our people so they can innovate and create lasting competitive advantage.”

A growing number of IT leaders treat compute and storage as they would the utility grid. To them, most of the technology stack can be regarded as a commodity, a layer of hardware and software no different from one organization to another. On top of that stack is a small but consequential layer of innovation that creates competitive advantage. “Your customers don’t care about your data centers,” says Drew Firment, chief cloud strategist at online education company Pluralsight. “They care about value. The goal of cloud is to get rid of that undifferentiated heavy lifting so your technologists can focus on the services and solutions that matter.”

But recognizing cloud advantages doesn’t always mean a smooth transition from on-prem. In the process of moving assets to the cloud, some people use a lift and shift approach without taking advantage of cloud native functions. But far worse than that, a mistake too many CIOs make is moving assets to the cloud without adapting engineering practices to the new paradigm.

What has been learned over the last 15 years—often the hard way—is that for organizations to realize the full potential of cloud computing, they need to build and maintain a cloud-conscious culture based on five key pillars.

Leadership

The most important part of the cloud-conscious culture is leadership. “Start with a vision and accompany that vision with leadership,” says Jay Mahanand, CIO of the United Nations World Food Program. “Leaders need to walk the walk and talk the talk.”

The vision of WFP’s technology division is to stay on top of technology and apply it in ways that help the organization achieve its mission to end world hunger, a mission which won them the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. Much of the work requires travel to remote regions of the world, and teams need to become operational almost immediately. “We want to be able to go somewhere, disperse our service, and collect the data we need as quickly as possible,” says Mahanand.