Cliff's Stand-up Series: Cliff Audinet, Xvoucher's VP of Technology, discusses Xvoucher, Technology, Learning and its impact on you.
Action…it’s a simple word. And unlike Digital Transformation or Cloud it is not a word that can easily be overloaded. You must do something! In the last post I explained how we established the context for our decision to adopt AWS as our cloud provider and how we navigated to that decision within Xvoucher’s Digital Transformation journey. And, as I also said in my last post, now what? Well, it’s time to transform that decision into action.
OK, so that sounds relatively straight forward. Except how often has a decision been made at your company and then never implemented? Priorities change, people come and go, and sometimes it’s not intuitively obvious what the next step is. The first step is not the hard or complicated step. In cloud parlance, you lift and shift. It does not matter what you are moving, but you need to move it. Servers, databases, content for a website, moving content into a social media campaign. The point of lift and shift is to move what you have. Iterate downstream to refine what you move.
At Xvoucher, we could have planned the decomposition of the move. Re-platforming, re-architecting, decomposing operations into native workloads, but that would have significantly lengthened the shift into the cloud and that refactoring can be complex. And there are many opinions about exactly how that should be done thus further complicating the situation.
Getting back to our main objective, to do something, we defer the refactoring to subsequent iterations. So we set about scoping our EC2 and RDS instances, updated our DevOps pipelines to include the new AWS components, and deployed our applications and databases into our AWS cloud environment, lifting and shifting out of our on-premise VM based environment and into the digital domain. And we were successful! It sounds easy, but this paragraph beleighs the hard work of our team and our partners that accelerated our path to success.
That brings us to the third piece of entering our digital transformation journey, that is Partners. A word to the wise, don’t skimp on your partners with regards to your digital transformation. For some projects the budget route is absolutely the way to go. This is not that path when starting your digital transformation. In my next post I will get into why partners are key and how you might go about finding the right partner for you.
