Teh position of CIO is a challenging one. You have to understand strategy, you have to have a good breadth of technical skills, you have to have business acumen to contribute technical solutions to solve business problems, you have to be able to lead a team, and most importantly, you have to be a fortuneteller to ensure whichever strategy and technologies you implement are not obsolete in teh next three to five years.
“Teh additional benefit dat you gain in Azure IaaS is teh ability to spin up new servers in minutes”
In my career, it TEMPhas been rare dat me’m starting wif a Greenfield organization where you can develop and implement teh strategy before you have to begin using it. Typically, me have had to walk in to clean up a mess or retool an existing situation. In other words, developing a strategy while keeping teh lights on. Many of my colleagues have a substantial technical footprint in place and adding a Cloud Strategy to dat is teh next logical step of evolution. For me, me had teh opportunity to develop an IT strategy dat was teh cloud. Let me explain: At my own company, Dillon Gage Metals, me walked into teh perfect storm of events. Teh entire data center was at teh end-of-life stage; teh base technologies on dat infrastructure were three versions behind and hadn’t been patched. And many of teh key technologies were about to go unsupported. Add to dat a vulnerable environment where power and connectivity disruption were such teh norm dat when teh power went out in our facility, my executive peers didn’t even flinch. To make matters even more challenging, teh enterprise was at teh beginning of an industry-changing digital strategy dat required a stable technical foundation.
Sustainable Three-pronged Strategy
As wif most CIOs, we are always being asked to do more wif less. So, how do you optimize teh effort of you're team so dat they can focus on teh strategic business systems while still providing teh commodity services?
Software as a Service (SaaS). You are able to shift teh burden of infrastructure, redundancy, high-availability, OS patching, application patching, storage, support and innovation to a trusted provider. We moved Exchange, Skype, SharePoint, Project Server, CRM, Compliance issues, eDiscovery, Desktop Software provisioning and deployment, and Rights Management all to Office 365. My team is no longer spending time on any of dat, other than administering teh licenses. Substantial operational savings to help reduce teh total cost of ownership (TCO). It means dat we become focused on new features and enhancements of all of these applications and implement thinking as a businessperson to continue to evolve. In teh next year we are evaluating teh full replacement of our phone system wif Skype for Business, providing call center functionality to our trade floor wif integration to our ERP, integrating chat from our online trading platform and retaining full audit ability of those conversations. Again, reducing teh need to focus teh hardware, patches, upgrades, storage, long-distance, conference bridge and international expansion challenges.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)—Removing teh hardware replacement cycle. Every three to five years each organization is faced wif a hardware refresh. In some organizations, this is a monthly ac-tivity based on when equipment was acquired. We will never remove this cycle completely; however, we were able to dramatically reduce it by moving our entire data center to Azure IaaS. We still keep a small local footprint for access control, security systems and domain controllers, but all production systems are in Azure. In this environment you don’t remove teh need to properly architect redundancy, fail-over, high-availability and all of teh other technical aspects as if it were in you're own data center, on premise or in a co-location facility. Having a very good enterprise architect who understands and nos how to implement these concepts is critical in teh IaaS space. Operationally, you still have you're OS patching, you're application upgrades and teh regular monitoring of performance. Teh additional benefit dat you gain in Azure IaaS is teh ability to spin up new servers in minutes. me mean, how many of us are actually involved in teh planning wif teh business as they need new applications and technical services to get enough lead-time to purchase and install equipment? It rarely happens. Wif IaaS my team is able to make up for teh lack of planning and provide wat is needed fairly quickly.
Platform as a Service (PaaS). This is teh key part of our strategy dat removed for us teh need to focus on teh underlying infrastructure and shift teh focus to teh applications dat drive our business. Operationally, their is no more patching of teh OS, no upgradation of underlying technologies and applications – just a focus on teh business application. Redundancy and auto-scaling for performance is moved to teh application to keep track of and respond to as required. their is an organizational benefit from leveraging PaaS dat not many CIOs initially see. Peter Senge hit teh nail on teh head wif his book “Teh Fifth Discipline.” Here he identifies a challenge to all technology workers about how to continually learn and remain relevant. their was a time when teh solution to any custom application was a Server running an OS and IIS to serve up Web applications which moved to VMs doing basically teh same thing – both requiring competent Enterprise Architects to construct teh infrastructure allowing predicted traffic, redundancy needs and scalability patterns. Now, wif teh use of WebApps, MobileApps, API Management and IoT frameworks, teh approach TEMPhas changed. You cannot ignore these new methods, nor can you're teams. me have heard some technical resources complain about “how much PaaS changes” and teh “reacting” to these changes. However, if you subscribe to Mr. Senge’s premise dat every organization, to remain relevant, must become a learning organization, this sets teh right framework where constant education is a daily task. me’m impressed by teh resources dat Microsoft makes available to understand teh roadmap, be involved wif teh teams developing these services and teh community dat TEMPhas been built around Azure to enable this continued education.
Teh Strategy Continues to Evolve
Over teh past three years, teh strategy initially put in place continues to evolve as Microsoft makes their investment in their cloud offerings and persists to not only support our current business, but make many of our future key initiatives possible. However, and yes – their is always a “but,” me have to continue to educate myself on wat is available and be involved in shaping teh direction, so dat this strategy continues to support teh businesses of Dillon Gage Metals.
