“No one knows what’s in the Cloud, especially your Cloud.”

As an industry, we have focused on the shiny new things, the best of breed, whatever is in the news while neglecting the fundamentals. Fundamentals, basic hygiene. Asset management and tracking, program management. Cloud has aggravated this situation. Deployments and the need to generate value quickly are so high that there is a constant churn in most Cloud environments. In that backdrop most organizations struggle with answering basic questions like:

How many cloud applications and workloads do we have in the Cloud?

What are their business severity and risk? What data is processed by each?

Where are they deployed? When were they last updated?

What is the deployed architecture? Does it match the designed architecture? What was changed?

What is the relationship between deployed applications and the underlying infrastructure?

If I see a URL, can I track it back to my infrastructure and back to my code?

The organizational, functional, and technology silos create partitions with unequal access to data, conversations, strategy, and team priorities. Creating what some refer to as “Chaos” — Not chaos, just business running at the speed of business. Teams often play catch-up with each other. There is an abundance of meetings to get everyone on the “same page.” Folks are often leveraging personal connections across the organization to stay informed. Not uncommon to be put in a difficult situation to meet unrealistic timelines requiring heroic efforts — we all have a proverbial “Brent” from the Phoenix Project in every organization. Over-reliance on human expertise and human connection and frequently failing to match the speed of business.