The Analytics Leadership Consortium (ALC), a closed network of senior analytics executives from diverse industries, meets to share and discuss best practices, as well as discover and develop analytics innovation, all for the purpose of improving the business impact of analytics at their firms. And although these companies are very diverse in terms of industry, size and even analytics maturity, they are often working on very similar initiatives. One such initiative is migrating to the cloud, where every nondigital native company is taking steps to build out a hybrid strategy.
Deploying to the cloud is not so much a question of “if,” it’s a when, a how and how much discussion. Analytics leaders need to know and anticipate what they will encounter as they move from on-premises to a hybrid state (even possibly fully operating in the cloud). Key topics that even nontechnical leaders need to work through include:
· Understanding the expected cost of service, including how and where to maximize value plus recommendations for incremental savings, including how to account for any operational savings
· Being aware of the SLAs regarding uptime and understanding that who’s on the hook for losses in downtime needs to be clear
· Assessing the cloud market leaders, where (not surprisingly) the providers themselves may not be so clear about their own drawbacks or the strengths of their competitors
· Realizing that a lot of potential exists in effective utilization of the different types of managed services
· Recognizing inherent lock-ins when using different providers and factoring that into the hybrid part of the strategy
The ALC taps leading experts for webinars and summits, and since the ALC is composed of top practitioners, there is a lot of energy in a discussion on a topic like cloud migration. In this case, ALC members from Fortune 1000 companies heard from Jesse Anderson, data engineer, creative engineer and managing director of the Big Data Institute. Jesse has worked and published extensively on cloud technologies, and his presentation to the ALC on cloud migration strategies focused on avoiding mistakes and embracing best practices of companies that have undertaken cloud migration. Far from theoretical, the discussion between the analytics leaders and Jesse covered all the key topics above, and even led to an interesting debate about deploying GPU in cloud or on-premises.
Engaging this combination of expert guidance, field-tested best practices and cautionary tales on a topic as big as cloud migration can save analytics leaders a lot of pain and aggravation.
The ALC is a trusted community designed for analytics leaders to converse openly with these speakers and with one another. Exchanging solutions and approaches that cross industries can inspire new ways of thinking and address challenges in each organization.
Drew Smith is the Executive Director for IIA’s Analytics Leadership Consortium (ALC) and has been with IIA since June 2019. The ALC is a closed network of senior analytics executives from diverse industries who meet to share and discuss best practices, as well as discover and develop analytics innovation, all for the purpose of improving the business impact of analytics at their firms. With close to 20 years of experience, Drew has worked on both the business side of analytics, leveraging insights for business performance, and on the delivery side of analytics driving the use of enterprise analytics. Before joining IIA, he led the Data Analytics and Governance team at IKEA’s global headquarters in Europe.
You can view more posts by Drew here.