Microsoft’s New CEO: Satya Nadella

Microsoft has moved from being a follower in the cloud space five years ago to being a leader in the space and credit should be given to Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO.  Satya drove the Cloud Team at Microsoft and now drives the entire company further down the vision of a cloud computing Microsoft. 

I attended Satya’s presentation at the Microsoft partner conference yesterday and although he does not have the presence of Steve Ballmer, he does have a plan and it is working.   The news today that Microsoft will be reducing staff by 18,000 because of duplicate roles since the acquisition of Nokia is a distraction and not the story of what is going on at Microsoft.   Nokia acquisition may prove to be a bad decision or possibly brilliant but it doesn’t really matter that much for the overall success of Microsoft as a cloud provider. 

Microsoft is gaining ground with the Surface 3 and this one device may become the number one computing device.   Office 365 is leading the way for email and desktop apps leaving Google Apps in the dust.  Microsoft Azure cloud server platform is coming on strong and is the leading competitor to Amazon AWS. 

Microsoft is able to deliver cloud applications and servers at a lower cost than the traditional model.  Microsoft realizes this and Satya is leading an aggressive campaign to move customers to the Microsoft Cloud with the help of their partners like Nortec.  Satya Nadella will continue to use this strategy building Microsoft into a larger stronger company.

"Experience Migrating to the Cloud" Presentation by Kevin Griffin of Harvard Business Publishing

I attended an interesting presentation by Ken Griffin chronicling his migration of IT operations at Harvard Business Publishing to the Cloud.   Here are his lessons learned:

1.       "Without a plan, there can be no victory."  Understand and categorize your applications: Easy to move - do it;  Hard to move not critical, legacy -  kill or replace. 

2.      Identity and Access management in cloud solutions adds to the security challenges - need identity layer.  Enterprise Access Management as a Service – Okta.  Rolling out to cloud was a bit to easy!  IaaS in AWS was best fit for Harvard Business Publishing.  Custom apps migration strategy and decommission sun setting apps.  Train IT operations staff and build net new.

3.      SysAdmin requirements in the cloud really are different from traditional.  Need scripting skills, Dev Opps people and don't really need SAN skills etc.

4.      People is the hurdle.  Get excited about it!  AWS Architect is a high value skill!

5.      Excitement only lasts so long – Technical details:

a.      Make use of AWS free services.

b.      Include compliance requirements early - limit scope

c.      Use VPC Automate security auditing

d.      Get your alerts to become notifications

e.      Plan your instances to evaporate

f.       Don't store sensitive data on the ephemeral drives

g.      Make use of all available zones

h.      Control costs with reserved and spot instances

i.       Tags, Tags, Tags, and decide on a naming convention early

 

6.      Reduce the hump - the longer you are in hybrid mode the more resources and money you need.

 
Invest only in new world!


Source:  Ken Griffin, Director IT Services and Operations, Harvard Business Publishing