Welcome to my community insight podcast , where we share insights and stories from community experts to stay up to date with Azure . My name is Nicholas and I'll be your host today . In this podcast .
We will dive into cloud adoption framework , but before we get started , I want to remind you to subscribe to our podcast on social media so you never miss an episode and help us reach more amazing people like yourself . Today we have a special guest called Morten Godson . Sorry if I pronounced it wrong . Can you speak for yourself please ?
You really , you get points for trying Very good , yeah , it's quite long .
How are they ?
So thank you very much for inviting me , nicholas . I really appreciate that . So the way that we pronounce it I would say is Morten or Morten , and then the last name is Knudson or Knudson . So , but the K can be a little hard to pronounce that , so Morten is fine .
All right , so can you just introduce yourself , morten ? Yes , I can do that .
So yeah , as I said , my name is Morten and I'm from Denmark , based in the city called Kalling , about an hour's drive north of Germany . I'm a Microsoft MVP in security and I'm also an Azure hybrid MVP , and I've been a consultant for about 34 years right now and have done a lot of work .
But I would say my focus is Microsoft , in particular , with the infrastructure side of it . So , and I'm doing a lot of work in Azure , but again focusing on the infrastructure the security aspect of it . So , but I know my way around and a lot of services out there and , in particular , I would say that I do a lot around logging .
That's my little thing that I do and I like enjoy a lot , but I help the customers doing cloud , enabling cloud adoptions from various sizes , like enterprise customers , medium-sized customers , how my day-to-day work .
Brilliant so has . Today theme is cloud adoption framework . Can you tell us more about what it is ?
Yes , I can do that . So , as I said , I use cloud adoption framework when I'm talking with customers and for me , a cloud adoption framework , I think of it as a template . That's probably the easiest way to think of it .
So it is kind of bringing in all the experiences from thousands of deployments worldwide where Microsoft and partners have contributed with their learnings over the years about best practice around cloud adoption , with focus on Azure . So when I say that it's a kind of a template , it's for me it's kind of a checklist .
It's like a lot of lessons learned , best practices where I can accelerate the adoption with respect of the customer's maturity . So it kind of can take a customer through all the different phases from you know what is this , how do I address this , what is my business strategy ? How do I plan this correctly ? How do I prepare my organization ?
What team should be in place , how do I deploy landing zones , how do I manage it ? How do I implement government ? So it kind of takes through all the life cycle of this .
So would you think that it's things ? Cloud adoption framework is shortening of CAF . How does CAF guide organization to the cloud strategy Like ?
I was saying I think it kind of you can align your business , business strategy against the cloud adoption framework .
So I think it's very important that you always keep in mind that when you do Azure and cloud , you want to do it so that it aligns with the business strategy and your organization and the maturity , in particular , that your organization is , and so what I've learned is that it changes .
So once you become more and more mature , then things are changing along the way , so you might start up having one design , but things are changing , so it's always in motion . Think of it as versions , where you are implementing new versions of your cloud adoption framework along the way .
Okay , cool . So what are some of the key principles for successful cloud adoption for businesses that you will recommend ?
So I think one thing to keep in mind is , of course , that you need to align to your enabling things setting up security and stuff like that . That runs in the technology aspect of it , where you implement all these different tools and CAF enables you to do that very fast , using templates to set that up very fast .
And then you have a process track where you are working around the processes that needs to be in place with the customer's environment . And then , lastly , you have an organization track , and typically people are struggling with the last two tracks because that is where the hard stuff is .
It's pretty easy to enable all the technology aspects of this , but it is harder to make sure that the processes and the people are aligned to this , and this is where the maturity comes into place . So , for example , it's say you have an immature organization or a less mature organization .
They maybe think of security as something that is kind of a set and forget . So they enable their set , some settings , and they don't think about having to go back to that place again .
But if you're working in .
Azure . When you know how often that new features are coming out . It's very important that you get some lifecycle around this so that you make sure that you have some cross-organization teams that are working together on making sure that the security settings are kept and are discussed on a frequent basis and then implemented .
This is now where you're talking about that . You need to have a lifecycle around this . That can be hard for some customers that are used to coming from a world where they just deploy some policies and actually directory and then they don't come back to this again , but due to their high frequency in the Cloud , they're taking the innovation .
We need to have these processes to run . There are a lot of different of these processes that needs to be in place , like governments , the cost , security , automation . This is where things can become a little harder to adapt .
From your experience . What are some of the challenges you have faced when implementing tasks in businesses ?
Like I was saying before we said , and forget the way you want to implement some lifecycle around this . That can be a challenge . Another example can be simple as communication . Let's say that you have a big team .
Maybe there are 50 people or 100 people that are doing work in Azure every single day and maybe you have a smaller group that are responsible for a naming convention . It's not enough just so that the smaller group agrees upon a naming convention .
You also have to communicate out to the bigger group about what are the naming convention , where can they find them , where are the templates and so on . I think communication can be a struggle . A third thing can be the automation . A lot of times when you want to do things right , you want to have a CMDB where you have defined settings .
If you don't have a CMDB , then how can you automate things ? I think that's an example of where a less mature customer maybe start without a CMDB , but they want to do automation and then later on they start to get a CMDB . Things are changing along the way .
Automation can be a struggle sometimes if the environment that you want to automate is very fragmented because it is coming from an early aversion of the CAF environment .
I agree with both the points about communication automation as well . From your experience , can you share some of the success stories where you have implemented CAF and adopted to the 해 ?
I like I was saying that typically I come out to customers where they are maybe running a version one of their as an environment and maybe it kind of started in a way where maybe the data department started to adopt and using , for example , as a , and then later on the IT department wanted to grab this asher and get into place .
So I think setting up and landing so way you can accelerate and building kind of a version two environment and be a very good experience for a lot of customers . So instead of you know trying to rework the existing , you're setting up in parallel version two environment and then you can re provision your services into this or you can move them over in a .
So this is where a can come into play because you can easily and very fast deploy you know a landing so environment . You can set up hundreds of policies and enable the automation around this . So that's where I think is is great . I also like the fact that the adoption in general with consultants are very high .
So when you are out with a customer and they can tell maybe other consultants we are aligning to cuff them . People know the environment , they know the , the acronyms , they know how management group layout is they know the policies . So I think it kind of helps that they are lining to this .
That's great , so has . This episode is coming to an end . I just want to ask you are you going to any future events in the future ?
Yes , I am , and I'm so happy that I can meet you next week when we're meeting at the summit . Yeah , I'm looking forward to that , and besides that , I'm also next month going to China .
Actually , I'm going to speak in Shanghai for the global day , so I will be going to Beijing and also Shanghai next month , so that I have a lot of trips coming up , but those are just a few of the future ones .
That's brilliant how can , how can people learn more about have been getting touch with yourself ? What can , yeah ?
so the just searching on the web around Microsoft cloud adoption framework would actually give you a great content around this , and it's structured very easily to it to adopt , so and you can find out easily where we're about information . About coming back to me , I also have a blog . It is more than that .
I'm sure that you will Link to it in the in the low , but otherwise it's more than that , and my name so and also encourage you to connect with me on LinkedIn . It's a molten water can't send on LinkedIn and I can also share the link for that and please connect with me . I'm happy to discuss anything , any questions that comes up .
Just Write me there or find me on Twitter . So a lot of chance there .
Okay , brilliant . Thanks for coming on this episode more time and in few weeks is going to be on that you too , sponsored by , and happy music , so say to bye , thank you .