Don’t Let Decision Paralysis Keep Your Company Grounded

The AWS Overview of Amazon Services white paper, which lays out titles and definitions of AWS public cloud options, is approximately the same length as The Great Gatsby and Fahrenheit 451; it’s roughly twice as long as Of Mice and Men, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Metamorphosis. The Fundamentals of Azure, an ebook offered for download on the Microsoft Azure website, is even longer, with a word count higher than Brave New World but not quite as high as Nineteen Eighty-Four. (GCP does not appear to have a downloadable text summarizing all services, but we’re confident it would be just as epic in scope if they did.) On top of current offerings, the advent of generative AI and its inclusion in cloud services will expand cloud vendor offerings substantially. And that’s before we explore questions like which cloud company? or hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, or single-vendor?

How many classic novels are you expected to read in order to begin understanding your place in the public cloud? Further, even if you read every word of every volume of cloud offerings, you would still have questions about what services are best for which needs, and how they all fit together into your cloud strategy. You would be forgiven if you found all these options overwhelming. But if that overwhelm keeps you away from the cloud, your business will miss out on all the opportunities described in those thousands of words and dozens of pages. Decision paralysis is real, and it must be overcome to move your company forward.

If you’re a regular reader of the Cascadeo blog, you know that a well-managed cloud migration offers your company improved business agility, data management, and capacity for growth at scale, among countless other benefits. You also know that maximizing the value of cloud and avoiding cost overruns and other issues requires expertise, which brings us back to the extraordinary number of options in public cloud computing. Particularly in a labor climate where cloud expertise is in short supply, what is a growing enterprise to do?

Your cloud journey, just like all your major operational endeavors, starts with a clear understanding of where you are now and what you want to accomplish. The first step is a deep-dive discovery and assessment process that reveals your architecture’s full content and functions. In other words, the path out of decision paralysis starts with you. It’s possible to conduct such an examination on your own, and an array of tools exists for self-directed discovery, but embarking on this first step with a qualified, expert partner opens access to tools and knowledge in-house staff accustomed to running on-prem environments generally does not have. Discovery and assessment can also be an excellent way to get to know a cloud partner before committing to a sizeable migration project. From there, you can begin with knowledge instead of confusion and overwhelm.

Once you have deep operational knowledge, you can begin to plan a cloud migration that serves your business needs and supports your goals, rather than starting from the nearly endless cloud possibilities and attempting to fit your strategy into them, or worse, pursuing a costly lift-and-shift migration that fails to take advantage of the opportunities in the cloud.

The most efficient way to wade through the mountains of cloud literature, of course, is to leave that to certified experts who not only know the public cloud options inside-out, but are experienced in deploying them to your advantage, and managed services that keep your deployment running smoothly with AI-augmented monitoring, top-notch support, and regular cost optimization, governance, and security analysis reporting. Kind of like hiring a guide to lead you through the forest of reading material so you can ace the exam and graduate to a higher computing standard.