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Datacom’s head of AWS, Paul Dunlop is a finalist in the Personal Innovation – Technical Excellence category of the 2024 Reseller Innovation Awards. He discusses how to innovate in the cloud. First step - standardise.
Governance, architecture and planning provide the foundation for innovative solutions in a cloud-based environment. A well-designed public cloud landing zone which is pre-configured, secure, and scalable, unlocks an enormous amount of agility for innovation terms while ensuring the proper guardrails are used.
Innovative solutions such as event driven auto scaling web applications, AI integration to existing applications, Internet of Things solutions, customer service avatars and chatbots, blockchain services, modern contact centres and more, are all made possible flexibly and securely.
By incorporating public cloud Well-Architected Frameworks (pioneered by AWS) within the landing zone and enhancing development principles to include new standards for modern cloud native application development approaches, organisations can innovate rapidly while maintaining operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and optimising cost.
Industry standards and regulations play a crucial role by providing guidelines and best practices for organisations to follow. Compliance with standards such as ISO/IEC 27001, NIST, and PCI DSS ensures that cloud services and the applications they protect, meet security, privacy, and operational requirements. They help achieve measurable consistency and reliability against industry requirements, giving an organisation's customers greater confidence in the services provided and the protection of their data.
Key benefits include increased security posture, reduced costs and better governance. Having a consistent approach streamlines processes to enhance cross-team collaboration and improve time to innovate in a more secure, efficient and cost-effective manner. Standardisation also evolves an organisation’s culture over time, blending traditionally siloed teams into an empowered collaborative engine. For example, enabling DevSecOps teams to create new platform and service capabilities allows a company to innovate more effectively on top of emerging and modern services, creating an evergreen approach to solving business problems.
Of course, there are challenges. Several come to mind including resistance to change, lack of skilled personnel, and the complexity of integrating existing systems with new standardised processes. Achieving consensus across different departments and aligning standardisation efforts with business goals can also be difficult.
It’s essential to establish a consortium of peers to approve new standards and for the organisation to induct everyone into them. This, supported by an ongoing awareness campaign (similar to how security undertake theirs) is of great importance, ensuring that the company’s ‘way of adopting cloud’ is continually top of mind.
Without standardisation and ensuring that everyone is taken on the journey, organisations may face challenges in managing and scaling their cloud environments leading to inefficiencies and potential downtime. Inconsistent practices can also result in compliance issues and vulnerability to security threats which may cause reputational harm in market and cost much more in the long run to clean up.
To balance standardisation with the desire for rapid innovation, I recommend a flexible approach to enabling development teams, setting clear guidelines and best practices, while allowing room for experimentation and adaptation. Implementing a governance framework that supports standardisation and innovation can achieve that.
To ensure creativity and innovation aren't stifled there are several strategies. Organisations can adopt a collaborative approach involving stakeholders from different departments. Encouraging open communication and feedback can identify areas where standardisation is beneficial and where flexibility is needed. Fostering a culture of continuous improvement and experimentation can drive innovation while maintaining standardised processes.
Foundational and development standards shouldn’t be seen as a set of handcuffs and should be created in a way that allows everyone to take a security-first approach to the business problems they're solving. If done properly, ideation of a new business idea can be taken from conception to reality (rapidly innovated and tested), in a way that incorporates the appropriate guardrails and is in depth from the beginning, giving rise to a greater level of assurance to all application and data security concerns while giving an improved, innovative customer experience in a shorter timeframe. A win – win.
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