When John Matouk & Co. migrated its ERP and manufacturing systems to Salesforce.com, officials found some of the simple things they were used to — like pressing a button to print out a Fedex label — required a change in processes. “That simple mapping of the different peripherals [and] thinking through where that stuff outputs to requires thought,’’ observes Stuart Kiely, vice president of digital strategy at the 90-year-old manufacturer and distributor of fine linens and luxury bedding. “We took it for granted in the old system and now we have to think it through in how we re-architect the packing process.”
The cost of transactional data storage has also been a surprise, Kiely says, and they went over their limit about a month in when the cloud systems went live in January. Because John Matouk & Co. deals with a lot of customer information, they are storing data around contacts, cases, opportunities and leads. “When you move an ERP system to the cloud, the data you’re generating is 10x more because every single time a piece of inventory moves you’re generating a cost transaction.”
Now Kiely’s team is working on moving some systems back on-premises and “connecting the dots there so our finance team doesn’t have a heart attack,’’ he says. This also requires careful planning “because there are so many relationships in the cloud you can’t just delete a record. There’s so many dependencies on other records so data just grows and grows and you can’t downsize in some instances.”
Tactical issues: Governance, workflows, and licensing
The 145-year-old Pacific Life is not using a lot of agile methodologies, says Vigil. “We have a couple of pilot groups that have helped us move to cloud, but most of the organizational structure is, ‘You do your part and when you’re done, you pass it on,’” he says. “It’s kind of like the Henry Ford assembly line, and we’re in the midst of trying to shift to having a cross-functional team servicing an app. We’re working to try to overcome that challenge now.”
IT also didn’t expect the complexity that moving to Amazon can bring “because you can do so much in there you need a way to control that and visualize that,” says Vigil. Pacific Life is using Dome9 for network security, which he says gives IT visibility into their workloads in AWS and the ability to troubleshoot if one application or system can’t talk to another.
Another so-called “gotcha” was the amount of governance required in the cloud. “On-premises, there are siloed functions, so you may have a couple of engineers that do firewalls and others doing engineering, so it’s more difficult to make a mistake, whereas in AWS, you assign a system admin a particular amount of access,’’ Vigil says. “So it’s quite easy to do the wrong thing quickly if they don’t know what they’re doing.”
Yet another surprise has been the need to figure out whether existing enterprise licensing agreements still apply, adds Salari. “Our contracts guys have been burning the midnight oil to figure out what is limited to on-premises, or do we have to purchase new licenses,” particularly with Microsoft, he says cloud architect requirements.
Then there have been mindset challenges. For a lot of his peers in IT, “the biggest anxiety was the lack of control and lack of being able to visualize in their mind what the cloud environment looks like,’’ says Salari. The biggest resistors have been the ones who haven’t seen the AWS console, he adds. It was helpful to do a lot of education on the cloud and the use of third-party tools so they could make sense of it, he says.
“I won’t say it was a complete light switch that was turned on,” he notes, “but once we showed them the console and what was there and the third-party tools and how they could interact with them, it reduced a lot of the anxiety, and while they’re not cloud converts, they’re no longer resistors.”
Silver linings
But not every surprise in the cloud is unwelcome. For Pacific Life, the ease of host-based security has been among the pleasant surprises, says Vigil. “In the cloud, there is way better security than we could ever hope to offer on-premises --without the cost,’’ he says.
The elasticity of the cloud has also been a big bonus. “On-premises we could do virtualization, but to scale up and down still requires that we have peak capacity in the form of hardware and in the cloud, we only rent what we need,’’ he says.
Salari has enjoyed being able to test something out in the cloud. He says he goes into his AWS lab account, buys compute in the marketplace and plays around with it for a week, all for around $7. “I love being able to kick the tires a little,’’ he says. “I would have loved to do this more when I was an engineer. It would have made things so much easier.”
PwC has also experienced happy surprises, says CIO Sigal Zarmi. The agility, efficiency and simplicity of the cloud have been a bonus, she says, and PwC’s employees view the cloud as a new way of working, rather than the technology itself.
“A great ‘gotcha’ moment for us was a recent survey of our people, where they estimated they were saving around nine hours a week by collaborating differently, having access to online communications tools and access to information when and where they needed it,” Zarmi says.
Salari anticipates Pacific Life will have all its web pages migrated to the cloud by the end of 2018, with the goal of getting all of its disaster recovery infrastructure into AWS by then as well. Within three to five years, he expects they will have most of their workloads and apps in a cloud environment. “We will only have things on-premises for licensing or practicalities,’’ he says. “We’re a big mainframe organization because we’re financial, so we’ll always be hybrid.”
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