Every failed Cloud Journey is a result of lack of Strategic Planning, E52
Hello All,
I wish you well.
We are covering the following today.
Core idea: Every failed cloud journey is a result of a lack of strategic planning
Will AWS come out stronger by selling tools(gold mining) in the era of the Generative AI (Gold Rush)?
3P framework and an information-dense class in Valuation from Aswath Damodaran
IBM- Investing in the future of Cyber-Security?
Let's go.
Core Idea: Every failed cloud journey is a result of a lack of strategic planning
Last quarter, the top three US Cloud providers reported a slowdown in revenue growth.
Cloud revenues are resilient to economic slowdowns - the industry said. Cloud is where the business will happen.
But things are slowing down.
I do not discount the macroeconomic forces but attribute the issues to a lack of strategic view around cloud transformation. It is the reason why most companies can not create the splash they hoped for.
Lofty savings are at the center of every cloud business case. But, Unrealized savings or exceeding spend causes these failures.
The majority of cloud migrations are Lift & Shift. Pick up what was running in a data center, and run it on a cloud. Shut down when you do not need it.
A lift and shift reduce your costs and burden from hosting, Storage, and maintenance.
But, Technical debt is at the core of improving performance, scalability, or security. True cloud optimization happens after fixing the technical debt and operational inefficiencies.
Unfortunately, companies that throw everything in the cloud, will struggle.
They will reap lesser benefits in their 1st year. Their costs will rise as they undertake app remediations or rebuild them as cloud-native.
As the business case melts, options like budget optimization, price shopping across clouds, and other drastic measures begin appearing.
In a cloud environment, because there is infinite scaling available, We don't need to scale everything. Applications, workloads, or services that contribute to revenue or experience should scale. It should be strategic.
It is important to focus on why and which workloads should move to the cloud, and how will they take full advantage of the capabilities.
Will AWS come out stronger by selling tools(gold mining) in the era of the Generative AI (Gold Rush)?
During the gold rush era, companies that sold digging equipment made more money than everyone who went in pursuit of gold.
Will that repeat, where the battleground for generative AI is getting hotter and hotter? and everyone wants to get a bite of it?
AWS launched Bedrock, a classic service for this use case. It enables customers to leverage server-less tech to invoke Foundational models(via an API) and build their Generative AI applications.
AWS is making available industry-leading models like Jurassic-2, Claude, Stable Diffusion, and Amazon Titan.
3P framework and a wonderful class in Valuation from Aswath Damodaran
I watched this information-dense talk from Aswath Damoadaran on valuation.
Two key lessons -
1. Every valuation number should relate to a story, and every story should lead to a number.
2. Companies at different stages must act their age and make decisions based on their strategic priorities.
Via Aswath, I also learned about the 3Ps framework, also known as the cone on plausibility. It helps in valuations and applies to problem-solving.
PPP - Possible, Plausible, Probable.
IBM- Investing in the future of Cyber-Security?
Recently a few researchers in China published a paper claiming a technique that can break encryption. It was theoretical and the computing required is in the nascent stages. but quantum computing is the next frontier that can pose threat in the world of cyber security.
Today, we use 256-bit encryption as the gold standard. it is quite secure. A supercomputer will take millions of years trying to brute force it.
But, Quantum computing can change that for good.
hence, for the past few years, we are seeing the word “Quantum-Safe” here and there.
IBM released support for Quantum Safe 2 years ago as part of the IBM cloud.
Now, 3 of the 4 published Quantum safe Algorithms are from IBM. These algorithms are now part of the NIST standards.
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Cheers
Saurabh