Many companies claim to have "gone to the cloud," yet returns from their efforts are meager or worse. Why? Because they've defined cloud as a destination, not a capability. Using cloud as a single-vendor, one-stop destination is fiction; in practice, today's organizations use a mosaic of capabilities across several vendors. Your cloud strategy needs to follow a hybrid multicloud model, one that delivers cloud's value at destinations you choose.

This practical guide provides business leaders and C-level executives with guidance and insights across a wide range of cloud-related topics, such as distributed cloud, microservices, and other open source solutions for strengthening operations. You'll apply in-the-field best practices and lessons learned as you define your hybrid cloud strategy and drive your company's transformation strategy.

• Learn cloud fundamentals and patterns, including basic concepts and history
• Get a framework for cloud acumen phases to value-plot your cloud future
• Know which questions to ask a cloud provider before you sign
• Discover potential pitfalls for everything from the true cost of a cloud solution to adopting open source the right way

From the Preface

Who is this book for?

The five of us got together and wrote a book that might (at times) be too technical for business leaders, but “too business-y” for technical people. If this is a complaint you’ve got after reading this book…perfect! While we definitely put some technical stuff in here, if you’re looking for a book on how to use kubectl—the CLI interface for Kubernetes—or use generator to create a ConfigMap, this is not the book for you.

Our experience has shown us—more than any one of us wants to admit—that too many business people don’t truly understand the technology they’re signing the bills for (or for that matter, that technology’s potential). Nothing good comes of this: late projects, missed expectations, excessive costs, and worse yet—lost opportunities. If business teams lack the “chops” to challenge IT or understand technology discussions within their organizations, it’s akin to using a decades-old word translation algorithm.

For example, one famous algorithm took a US phrase, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” and translated it into Russian as, “The vodka is good but the meat is rotten.” We think you get our point.

Business people—if your spirit is willing, we can’t promise you good vodka; but we can promise you a good (in fact, a great) foundation to a cloud strategy that lets you lead from the front and helps you be the leader you want to be.

At the same time, this book is for all those propeller heads (we know you well, we are you) who get enthralled with the underpinnings but fail to realize that technology for technology’s sake doesn’t help a business succeed. If you fit that profile, this book is going to really help drive your career because there are not a lot of people that have your technical backgrounds. Beyond helping the organizations you work for succeed, this book will give you options to “pond jump” into myriad leadership roles across your company and accelerate your career. For whatever pothole or mountain of accomplishments our authoring team has, we can tell you that it all came from a deep technology start with layers of business experience and acumen added over the years. We’re not saying be like us (that may or may not be a good thing), but we are telling you this: technology people who understand business outperform technology people who don’t understand business.

So just whom is this book for? We think anyone. You might be informed on all aspects of cloud, or you might just be getting started and have little understanding of how it works, why it works, or how to implement and scale a successful cloud strategy. While we targeted this book for all business leaders, no matter who you are, we think this book is going to help you. Naturally it’ll help those leaders who are not sure where to start, but we also think our personal experiences will greatly benefit those who have started and are unsure of where to go next. With all that said, we’re confident there is a cohort of business and technical individuals that this book is really going to resonate with. These folks typically work in large organizations that have been around for a while. These organizations have a mix of generational technology. They have monolithic apps they don’t want to touch because those rock-solid apps literally keep “the lights on,” but they’ve also built some cool mobile stuff using service-oriented architecture (SOA) or microservices (don’t worry if you don’t know what those are, we get into them in Chapter 4). If you work big-box retail, oil and gas, banking, airlines, government, insurance, consumer packaged goods (the list goes on and on), we can pretty much assure you that you fit into this group. This book is for you because you’ve definitely got some cloud going on, but you may not be making the progress you’d hoped for or (quite commonly) you’re not getting the returns you thought you’d be getting and wondering if you’re doing it right.

This book requires no previous knowledge of cloud. The topics we introduce will be helpful for a vast audience, ranging from business leaders to technical folks across all industries. If you’re a business leader, you’ll know just the questions to ask, the corners to look around, and the ideas to challenge as you tactfully plan your forward-thinking cloud strategy. If you’re a technical person, you’ll understand how your expertise can drive forward the organizations you work for with a solid understanding of how cloud challenges (especially for large-sized companies) are much different than a startup’s “Swipe your credit card and let’s get going” approach.

Whomever you are, we think the concepts you need to know to successfully scale a cloud strategy and get all the value out of cloud can be found in the pages that follow.

About the Author

Christopher D. Bienko covers the Information Management Cloud Solutions portfolio for IBM's World-Wide Technical Sales organization.

Chris Backer is Business Unit Executive of IBM Z Systems Software and Hybrid Cloud Platform where he leads its global client adoption program and a set of deep subject matter experts are helping clients from all industries around the globe design and implement IT strategies that incorporate cloud capabilities. A 21-year veteran in the IT Industry, Chris has spent his career focused on helping clients increase their competitive advantage through innovative use of automation, analytics and cloud technology.

Chris was previously the Business Unit Executive for IBM Watson Customer Engagement where he led Solution Engineering for IBM’s Marketing and Behavioral Analytics portfolio. Under Chris’s leadership he led the transition from delivering traditional on-premise capabilities to entirely SaaS based offerings to IBM clients.

Chris has also led a number of Tiger Teams within IBM whose sole purpose is to bring new technology capabilities to market. His experience building and leading innovative first of a kind technology projects spans across mobile application development, IoT, connected vehicle, behavioral analytics, fraud analytics and now hybrid cloud.

An avid outdoors man, Chris enjoys spending his free time exploring all that nature has to offer and when he isn’t immersed in technology you will find him in a Jeep traversing trail system’s that offer breath taking views and challenging obstacles along the route.

Chris Konarski is a Thought Leader with 20+ years’ in Technology, he is known and respected for his innovative approaches for technology sales and execution with an emphasis on helping customers unleash speed and innovation through digital transformation. Promoted throughout career for the most challenging, high-profile sales and technical leadership roles in recognition of innovation, building culture and consistency of results. He has achieved outstanding success developing new business models leveraging technology, services and solutions to help customers use technology as a competitive advantage. Chris has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to develop and lead talented teams, accelerate go-to-market capabilities, and develop modern approaches ?supporting rapid growth for world-class technology enterprise business units at IBM. His deep technical expertise and passionate leadership experience spans many areas: manufacturing, development, infrastructure, software, security, AI and Hybrid Cloud. Chris Currently Serves as Vice President of Technical Sales for IBM, where he has led the global technical sales for all the business units. Chris has an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a BSc in Chemical Engineering from New Jersey Institute of Technology. To balance his love for Tech, he is an avid outdoorsman with a passion for nature, so if you can not reach him then he is likely off the grid chasing elk or 100 miles offshore catching Tuna. Connect with Chris on LinkedIn to learn more.