Ahead in the Cloud Quotes

“An enterprise must transform by changing its culture, changing its bureaucracy, changing its organization, changing its technical architecture—and making them agile.”
― Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT

“Did you know that the American Red Cross was able to handle the huge volume of phone calls after Hurricane Harvey partly because it spun up a new cloud-based call center in just 48 hours?”
― Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT

“The hardest thing about getting started is getting started." -Guy Kawasaki”
― Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT

“Remember-"All of your constraints are debatable.”
― Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT

“It’s not enough to think it’s a good idea. It’s not enough to talk about it. It’s not enough to get a few of your leaders to agree with you.”
― Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT

“six approaches to be the most common: ​Rehosting (otherwise known as “lift-and-shift”) ​Replatforming (I sometimes call this “lift-tinker-and-shift”) ​Repurchasing (migrate to a different product/license, often SaaS) ​Refactoring (re-architect or re-imagine leveraging cloud-native capabilities) ​Retire (get rid of) ​Retain (do nothing, usually “revisit later”).”
― Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT

“transformation is hard. But not quite as hard as you’d think.”
― Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT

“The right culture also unlocks internal talent, because you don’t add innovation to a company—you get out of its way. An executive once told me “We can’t copy Netflix because we don’t have the people.” My response was “Where do you think they used to work? We hired them from you and got out of their way…”
― Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT

“Getting to cloud effectively means you need to figure out DevOps, but DevOps is often a re-org, not adding or re-naming a team. The whole organization needs to be recruited and compensated with an aligned strategy and rewards to get the culture right.”
― Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT

“not about a transformation that has a finite end state. It’s about becoming an organization that is capable of quickly deploying technology to meet business needs, regardless of where the technology comes from.”
― Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT

“You get the culture you pay for.” As we work on technology migration with enterprises, it’s usually people and processes that are the blockers, not technology problems.”
― Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT

“To survive in the current business environment, you have to be able to take advantage of evolving technology trends, and the one thing that’s been constant the last 10 years—and I believe will continue to be constant the next 20 or 30 years—is that technology is going to continue to change at a rapid pace.”
― Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT