Rik Hepworth is the Chief Consulting Officer at Black Marble. Rik has experience in various areas, including marketing, PR, design, and print. His primary focus is information technology, and he has experience designing, deploying, and managing IT projects of varying scales for various organizations. Considering his contributions to the community, he has been awarded the Microsoft MVP for Microsoft Azure. Rik helps customers look at how they can use cloud services as part of their overall IT strategy. His specialties revolve around IT Management, IT Strategy, and Cloud Migration.
Rick has been working with Cloud for quite a long time now. He says, “When I’m talking to customers, it depends on whom I’m having the conversation with, as to what angle they’re coming from. Oftentimes, I talk to people who think that cloud is simply going to be cheaper. Sometimes I talk to people who have applications where, because of the growth of the business, they’re looking to take advantage of cloud capabilities. There are also people who want to expand into a new country, and the cloud will make it easier for them. I also find relatively young organizations looking to take advantage of the agility and flexibility that the cloud gives. The only one of those scenarios that tend to be a slightly fraught conversation is if an organization genuinely believes the cloud is going to be a bit cheaper because it isn’t. But the cloud can be a great lever to help your business grow, change direction, and react to economic or business factors much more quickly than if you’re running on-prem. And that tends to be the biggest driver I see for organizations moving to the cloud.”
There are a couple of different situations that businesses can find themselves in. The first is the one that gets talked about most: “Our hardware is aging, we need to replace it, or our data center leases are coming up, and we want to move our infrastructure into the cloud”. Because it is not business as an organization, it is something that supports the business. Those kinds of migrations tend to be seized upon by its practitioners who focus more on one infrastructure. There are terms like lift and shift where we’re going to virtualize the servers and we’re going to move the workloads into the cloud. It’s certainly important because many organizations have components and infrastructure that they still need to run on virtual servers and get working. There is a risk with lift and shift because oftentimes, organizations underestimate the operating cost of what they’re about to put in the cloud. The lift and shift project is successful, but their cloud spend is more than anticipated. This tends to swallow the budget for what they should do in a cloud migration, which is application modernization. App Modernization is the wise way to move to the cloud. Organizations tend to fall into this trap because they don’t necessarily start early enough. They don’t really engage the team in that journey to give them the run-up to learn about how the cloud works, what tooling is needed, and what skills are needed. Rik spends much of his time helping people with that kind of conversation.
Rik’s customers who migrated to Azure had one thing in common, the benefits. They gained several benefits; for example, their billing went down. That’s one thing, but most importantly, the cost of the cloud was directly connected to the business’s revenue. Because of the nature of what was built in Azure, it was easy for them to innovate or modify an individual integration without affecting the rest of them. They got a lot of agility and flexibility they didn’t have when they were in the cloud. Particularly in the UK, where the economy is attractive, all are under pressure. Inflation is high, the more agility we can give the businesses that we work for, and the closer we can connect the costs to the amount of business we’re doing, rather than just being something that’s on the bottom line as a sort of a sunk cost that we’ve got to amortize across all the business. Most of Rik’s customers are trying to do that now because it makes it a lot easier to survive in this situation.