Cloud Based Infrastructure and the Future of EA
Cloud computing is turning the IT world upside down and especially for areas like Enterprise Architecture who seeks to provide value from the knowledge base of seasoned professionals. The practice itself is threatened, not so much by traditional structures of communication and governance but by a lack of agility within the practice. Enterprise Architecture in it’s academic form has many different caveats, tollgates, governance models and other “goo”. Goo is term that we can use to denote the stuff that keeps an application or infrastructure from happening in a timely fashion. In any company that is maturing an Enterprise Architecture practice, the tendency is for the utmost control. I believe this is mainly because of there is perceived value in capturing and overseeing the architectures as minimizing waste and reducing risk.
The cloud brings a new slant to the conversation of managing infrastructure, software and applications. The paradigm shift supports the fail-fast mentality. This allows us to stand up something, see it doesn’t work and move on with minimal collateral damage. Traditionally something that EA would have stepped in to assess. For example, we are rolling out new application and otherwise EA would have had guidelines on how and wha to deploy it on. With a shift to the cloud, the team finds that it doesn’t work well porting it into Oracle as the DBMS, so the shutdown the database and move it to MS SQL Server with minimal loss, just some time and a few hours of testing in the cloud.
the impacts to Architecture from the cloud is more expansive than the simple scenario I just laid out. Craig Le Clair and Henry Peyret in their Forrester publication highlight the changes. Their suggestion is to create zones within the enterprise to balance risk with agility. This is easier said than done, but I feel its a good starting place to gain footing and become the new SME of the Cloud footprint. In the article they talk about EA 2.0 and that the is the rebirth of a practice taking on cloud as a centerpiece of the way EA functions and provides value.
Craig Le Clair and Henry Peyret, (2015) Cloud Platforms Will Turn Enterprise Architecture Inside Out
https://www.forrester.com/dl/Cloud+Platforms+Will+Turn+Enterprise+Architecture+Inside+Out/-/E-RES121368/pdf
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