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  • The Cloud As A Launching Pad – Leverage The Cloud

    The Cloud As A Launching Pad – Leverage The Cloud

    I looked at the Parler-Amazon situation in a previous blog post as a cautionary tale. The focus was on the negative side of that situation and finding ways to avoid vendor lock-in. In this article, I will look at the positive side of that situation. Parler would likely not exist at all and definitely would not be the same if not for Amazon. This is a tale of how we can leverage the cloud to take our business to new heights.

    Leverage The Cloud To Plan Big

    In the past, technology required a lot of setup, configuration, negotiations, and then waiting for our order to be fulfilled. Those steps can be accomplished in minutes and provide us a solution at scale with cloud solutions. Yes, opening an Amazon account and getting through the verification steps may take a day or two. However, once we have that out of the way, we can build an enterprise system without a need to order servers or negotiate deals. We also can build a solution for our small business today that grows to support our enterprise tomorrow. Better yet, this is not something only Amazon provides. There are countless full-scale providers like Microsoft and Google and niche solutions like Salesforce, NetSuite, and so many others. We have the opportunity to start small and grow as big as our vision allow

    Scaled Technology

    In the Parler example, they started with a need for a platform that supported messages and profiles for a user base of maybe thousands. When that suddenly grew, they could leverage the cloud and instantly support that growth of server requirements. We could gloss right over that fact, but it would miss how critical SAAS and cloud solutions can be to organizations’ “overnight success.” That would ignore a history of businesses that were not ready for substantial growth, and they ended up folding instead of becoming a success. We can look back a few decades to the Internet boom of the late ’90s. There we find numerous examples of companies that bet big on marketing, got a hit, and then collapsed due to a lack of ability to support rapid growth.

    A Positive Focus

    It is easy to point to big organizations like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and even IBM (remember them?) as behemoths that squash the little guys. On the other hand, part of their growth has come from the platform they provide to many of those same little guys. It is astounding how many companies have e-commerce capabilities and a way to connect to customers. That is often because of these giant companies and their offerings. Of course, the platforms will take their cut. For example, it is only fair that Apple should get a share of sales on the Apple store. We can argue about how much (or little) is “reasonable.” Nevertheless, that does not remove the fact that so many companies and individuals rely on these platforms to exist. That is where the previous warning against single vendor lock-in came from.

    Know Your Place

    Therefore, we often need these big vendor relationships to get our business off the ground. We are wise to be wary of the partnerships we put in place. However, we also can use them to think bigger than we have in the past. The promise of the cloud is a near-infinite ability to scale a solution that is designed right. Do not let that be ignored as you consider how to position your product or organization. We can paint these platforms as the next monopolistic wave. On the other hand, we are better served by finding ways to leverage what they provide. That allows us to get our own organization off the ground and on a solid footing.

  • Select Multiple Vendors For A Reliable Foundation

    Select Multiple Vendors For A Reliable Foundation

    Recent political events in the United States have seen organizations and people “canceled” or de-platformed. While one can look at these as situations a business should avoid at all costs (getting swept into politics), it is an excellent cautionary tale. The Achilles heel of many of these organizations is a reliance on a single vendor for a key facet of their business. No one provider will ever give you the flexibility of multiple vendors.

    Vendor Lock-in

    The concept of vendor lock-in is not new. However, it has gotten fuzzy in areas like Cloud computing and businesses that are “too big to fail.” The Parler example falls exactly in this zone. They relied on Amazon AWS for their data infrastructure and went dark when Amazon decided that there was a breach of the user agreement. Your thoughts on Amazon’s actions do not save the folks at Parler from making a critical mistake. They put all of their eggs in the Amazon basket. They had vendor lock-in even though I bet they never considered it as such.

    Yes, you can point to this as a case of letting politics guide a business. However, this could happen if Amazon sold off the AWS products, or even if someone at Amazon (or within your organization) hit the wrong switch. There are countless tales of sites that went down for a period of time because of spam-blocking or other automated processes triggered by a simple mistake. You do not have to be in the news to have something shut down your access to a product.

    Multiple Vendors And Disaster Recovery

    The whole purpose of creating a DR plan is to consider what happens if you lose a key vendor or resource for any reason. It could be a natural disaster, one of Public Relations, or any other reason. The point is to address the problem of losing that resource. A good disaster recovery plan considers these events and looks to multiple vendors and their locations. Some DR plans rely on the stability a cloud provider gives you. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other providers have multiple data centers spread across the globe with redundancies built to avoid downtime. In some cases, that is sufficient. We pay these vendors money to handle our DR headaches. However, that does lock us into those vendors when we choose only one.

    Cloud To The Rescue

    One of the benefits of cloud providers is that they allow us to scale up our usage. We can have a tiny server at minimal cost and powerful ones that are costly but drive our business. Thus, smaller businesses can get some of the Cloud’s enterprise features without a high cost up-front. This same benefit should lead us to look at multiple vendors, even with the smallest of businesses. This concept also extends out beyond our server needs. We can embrace the cloud to handle many of our needs. For most businesses, this includes things like payment providers, customer communications, billing, and payroll. Many vendors want you to rely on them and will even provide attractive packages. However, make sure you understand the risks involved.

    It Is Your Data

    First and foremost, make sure any vendor agreement includes a way for you to get your data. The Parler case included Amazon, stating they would allow access to the application data and even help Parler migrate off their platform. That may save the business from immediate death. Think of what would happen if you lost all of your financial or customer data. You should ensure that any licensing includes your ability to own your data and content. There should also be language that restricts a vendor from being able to leverage or use the same. Content platforms are famous for this, including many social networks. They have language that allows them to share or use your content to promote their platform. If you get paid for that usage, then that is good. However, you could find yourself effectively funding a vendor’s marketing campaign or at least providing essential content.

    Finally, make sure you test your access to data early and often. Exports and APIs are excellent tools. On the other hand, they can change and cause data loss or impact recovery times. You might also find that you need a tool or solution to do something with that data. If you can not afford to have the migration tools in place or it is not practical to migrate data regularly, at least ensure you have a reasonable estimate of the time and cost in a DR situation.

  • Addressing Technical Debt With Minimal Cost

    Addressing Technical Debt With Minimal Cost

    Organizations small and large move forward at an increasing pace. That makes it easy for things to be lost in the activity required to maintain our focus. These lesser tasks often include important deliverables that we say we will “get done later.” That is also known as technical debt. Put simply; these are the items left to do if we were to complete a project. When they are left undone, we are not able to claim a project or task is complete. This situation may seem easy to solve (just do the work), but it is not that simple. We have projects that are “good enough” that are super-ceded by higher priority projects. Here are some ways to address that technical debt without having to sacrifice those high priority projects.

    Research And Improvement Hours

    Many years ago, Google had a benefit for its staff that was shrewd in its approach. They set aside Fridays for personal projects for all the staff. These could be running with ideas for a side hustle or improving parts of the company or product. The organization sacrificed some time, but it ended up increasing the overall productivity of their workers. People will put in extra effort for things they enjoy. This benefit also made employees feel more ownership over the projects they worked on.

    There are many ways to adopt this approach to your situation. The easiest is to set aside a few hours each week for employees to work on whatever they desire. It could be training, chasing down a side project, or improving something they currently are working on. Those options may seem too open-ended. However, many employees will be willing to use that time to eliminate technical debt to feel better about the work they have done. There is also a morale boost that projects like this give to staff. The change in work focus allows them to do something different, which appeals to them more. They sometimes even find that there are parts of their job that they enjoy.

    Fill In The Gaps

    Many productivity suggestions include finding ways to tackle little things among the larger tasks. In our modern world of waiting for people to show up for a meeting, reply to an email, or waiting on vendor responses, there are many times we have “downtime.” These events could have us sitting and waiting without being productive while our path forward is blocked. When we have a list of little tasks available, those can be used to make use of that time. Fortunately, many technical debt items are a perfect fit for this.

    For example, documentation is often some portion of technical debt. In many cases, we can pick up and put down documentation projects fairly quickly. They have little intellectual requirements, and a rough draft of notes can quickly be captured. When these small tasks are made available to staff (or pointed out to them), there are opportunities to chip away at the debt list. Just a few minutes a day on these tasks can add up quickly over time.

    Technical Debt Side Projects

    It was mentioned earlier that a change in focus could be refreshing. Many of the technical debt items require a small project to address the need. This need can be in the form of data migration, simple automation, or data entry. All of these can be side projects assigned out to staff or for staff to choose. These side projects are typically one-offs where there is a lot of freedom to choose how they are done and the technologies involved. That can be a win-win for an organization. The staff member can use a side project to learn a new skill while the organization gets a needed item completed. In some cases, these side projects can lead to ideas for commercial products and other game-changing solutions.