Starting Your AWS Cloud Migration: Moving from Reactive to Proactive
Oct 06, 2020
Often, a transition to the AWS Cloud is triggered by an external event – a data center closure, an impending hardware upgrade, a demand for a new app. But making the migration in “react mode” is a missed opportunity that can lead to heartache and expense down the road. Read on to discover how to get out from behind a reactive mindset and fully maximize your AWS Cloud migration with a proactive mind shift.
What Is “React Mode?”
When an organization acts in response to an external event, constraint, or threat, it has already lost. It is lost initiative, the ability to control the narrative, the chance to build a project on its own terms. An opportunity has been missed to directly progress toward greater organizational goals, both near- and long-term.
Though some may enjoy the rush that comes from crisis management, constantly putting out fires is not a path to success. So how does a culture move from a reactive mindset to one squarely centered on its goals – especially when emergencies really do pop up from time to time? It starts with shifting organizational thinking to the end-user or the end goal, instead of focusing only on the immediate problem.
Focusing on the End User
While compelling events can and do often kickstart change, starting with the end-user in mind helps individual people and departments work holistically across operations. It avoids the siloing that pushes organizations into defensive problem solving, bogs down operations, and stifles creative and proactive innovation.
The AWS Cloud and Freedom to Innovate Go Hand-in-Hand
This is the mindset with which to approach your transition to the AWS Cloud. What could your technical staff accomplish, if their responsibilities were focused on providing value aligned with the organizational mission, freed from the burden of managing data center infrastructure? It is truly transformative when the efforts of your professionals drive toward building better and thinking bigger, instead of getting bogged down in troubleshooting a single problem, or updating, patching, and testing with software and hardware that will always leave them steps behind. Shifting organizational mindset to an end-user perspective drives proactive innovations in both the product/solution and the process of migration, providing better capabilities with the added benefit of far fewer fires along the way.
Shifting out of a reactive mindset can help your team more fully seize the opportunities of the AWS Cloud, but it is also important to include shareholders outside of your team. In our next blog post, learn about the pitfalls of trying to go it alone – and how to avoid this common problem.
Asim Iqbal
Asim is Enquizit’s CTO and a member of the founding team. He has been an SME on security, storage, and resilience as well as Enquizit’s Lead Architect and VP of Solution Architecture. Among his professional endeavors is the implementation of a weather modeling HPC setup for Environment Canada, storage design and implementation for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind’s library, Media ingestion, encryption, and transcoding architecture for Bell Satellite TV, Cloud infrastructure, resilience, and security architecture and implementation for The Common Application and complete migration of Harvard Business Review’s Primary and DR data center to AWS. He maintains a strong personal interest in frictionless technical designs focused on end-user happiness and employee satisfaction, still thinks that ‘Data Availability Architect’ (from his early days working with HPE) is the coolest certification title ever and is an ex-CISSP. He neither confirms nor denies his purported afflictions with coffee, slow travel, and cats with unbridled spirits.
