The Red versus Blue Pill approach to Cloud Adoption
The Red versus Blue Pill approach to Cloud Adoption
In The Matrix, Neo is offered the choice between a red pill and a blue pill by rebel leader Morpheus. The red pill represents an uncertain future — it would allow him to escape into the real world, but living the “truth of reality” is harsher and more difficult.
On the other hand, the blue pill represents a beautiful prison — it would lead him back to ignorance, living in confined comfort without want or fear within the Matrix.
Companies commencing their cloud journey are facing the same conundrum. Do they take the red or the blue pill approach to Cloud adoption?
The promise of cloud
We all know the story by now. Migrating your IT landscape to the cloud provides massive benefits! Not only can you reduce costs, enjoy increased flexibility, and enable easy collaboration. It also gives your business the competitive edge we are all longing for.
Can the cloud live up to its promise? For sure, it can! But it all depends on how you approach it and what you expect.
The Blue pill approach
In the blue pill approach, a company wants to migrate its IT infrastructure to the cloud, without making significant changes to its current IT architecture.
Blue pill companies see their cloud migration as trading in their commodity data center infrastructure for a more flexible alternative offered by a public cloud provider.
No concerns about running out of capacity and no more nightly trips to the datacenter fixing failed IT infrastructure. That all sounds great, doesn’t it?
While the blue pill approach to cloud migration will solve some key operational problems, it comes at a cost and leaves many opportunities untapped.
The business is still wondering why it takes months to make simple changes to their applications and doesn’t stop complaining about that old reporting tool, which doesn’t give them any useful insight into their data.
Why is it that hard to integrate real-time data from our suppliers into the ERP system? Wasn’t the cloud supposed to solve all this?
“As with many things in life, there are no quick fixes.”
The Blue pill approach is a great way to quickly move to cloud, avoiding reinvestment in legacy data centers and IT infrastructure.
Nevertheless, it’s only the first step in your journey.
The real work hasn’t yet begun. You are still stuck in the Matrix for the foreseeable future.
The Red pill approach
The red pill approach to cloud adoption is a totally different beast!
Companies that have the audacity to take the red pill recognize that the promise of cloud can only be fully leveraged by radically changing their way of working.
As a wise man once said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Red pill companies smash the silos between infrastructure and application squads and team up with the business to architect cloud-native solutions that address key business problems.
They don’t look at cloud as a solution to only host their IT infrastructure, but as a platform that enables them to open up data silos, implement evolvable business applications and focus on deep integration with their complex ecosystem of suppliers and customers.
They don’t think in terms of compute, storage and networking, but in terms of Data Architecture, Application Architecture and Ecosystem Integration.
Are you ready to escape the Matrix?
Both methods have their strengths but are meant to solve entirely different problems.
Before you start your cloud journey, think carefully, and decide which problem you want to solve.
Using a two-stage rocket approach to cloud adoption can definitely be a solution, but you don’t necessarily have to visit the moon before going to Mars.
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The Red versus Blue Pill approach to Cloud Adoption was originally published in FAUN Publication on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.