Twenty years ago, organizations discovered the magic of server virtualization. Among the many benefits of virtualization, it heralded the end of the need for one physical server per application and the beginning of managing software-defined infrastructure. It helped automate building and installing systems, and it helped lay foundations for today’s Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery mechanisms and DevOps practices. However, the adoption of virtualization was not always smooth and several hurdles stood in its path. Today’s organizations are facing similar obstacles in their journey to the cloud.

Organizations that wanted to virtualize their server environment two decades ago faced a significant challenge that was neither technical nor budgetary, but organizational, stretching across IT teams and beyond. The first team to be concerned about virtualization was the one in charge of installing the physical servers in the racks of the datacenter, managing the physical network connections and operating environmental controls, such as HVAC and power systems. These tasks were drastically reduced, if not outright eliminated.The second team affected by this shift in technology was the one responsible for installing the operating system and running the post-install procedures. Their job almost completely disappeared as most virtual machines were automatically instantiated from templates.

As a result, successful adoption relied on the ability to smooth these organizational changes. Along the way, training the staff and making sure they acquire the new skills necessary to operate the virtualization infrastructure was critical. And usually, the affected teams eventually found that their new responsibilities were different but still essential to the organization, and perhaps even more appealing.

Virtualizations lessons for cloud transformation regulators

Discussions on virtualization didn’t end with these internal changes when organizations were operating in a regulated environment. They needed to engage closely with their regulators. Regulated organizations often considered the hypervisor solely as an additional layer of software with potential vulnerabilities.

This viewpoint raised risks (such as virtual machine escape) that didn’t exist with physical servers. Even if this is taken into account and the risks mitigated, it should have been considered in balance with all the benefits of machine virtualization, including security benefits such as asset identification, harmonization, and smoother patch management.

While the relevance and benefits of virtualization are now widely accepted, history has repeated itself as similar issues have arisen for organizations facing cloud migrations. When large cloud service providers (CSP) began supporting critical workloads for their customers, regulators increased their oversight over CSPs and issued guidance concerning cloud adoption. This happened in the European financial sector, with guidelines from the European Supervisory Authorities (European Banking Authority, European Securities and Market Authority and European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority,) and the coming Digital Operational Resilience Act regulation.

These regulations can help establish trust between providers and customers. As regulator decisions are vital for organizations, there is an opportunity now with cloud technology to balance the risks with the benefits and take into consideration all the ways CSPs can help organizations improve their overall security and compliance levels.

Cultural transformation can drive cloud transformation

Another similarity between cloud transformation and the journey to virtualization is the required internal transformation. When an organization decides to start its journey to the cloud, training its staff with the new technology and tools is a necessary step, but probably not the first nor the most arduous to make. A change of mindset is paramount to fully incorporate all the cloud benefits, in particular regarding security.

This new approach begins with a deep transformation at the organizational level. Organizations should avoid viewing the cloud as a datacenter because there’s so much more potential to cloud technology. This new approach and its accompanying organizational transformation is driven by two factors: The burdens that the CSP removes from the customer, and the new flexibility that software-defined infrastructure brings to the table.

The CSP directly manages several tasks and services, and their security, which means that they’re no longer a direct concern for the customer. These responsibilities include data center management, security-hardened hardware, default encryption for data at rest and data in transit, and resilient network management.

Since all the infrastructure used by the organization to manage its workloads is software defined, it brings much more flexibility to what can be done with it. Software-defined infrastructure can more easily enable security guardrails and continuous compliance that weren’t possible before.

While there’s a temptation to approach an organization’s cloud transformation as merely a “lift and shift” operation from on-premises infrastructure, the reality is that approach reduces the potential gains a cloud transformation can bring to an organization. Moving systems to the cloud accounts for a small portion of the potential impact, while updating the mindset can be truly transformational. Development, architecture and security processes need to be rebuilt; this inevitably requires a deeper transformation of the organization.

The next step is to transform the operations, to align them with the overall organization and the new defined processes, operationalize CI/CD and build DevOps practices. After that, the technological gap will be adjusted, moving the new tools and teaching teams how to best use them.

The important point here is the order of the transformation to manage: organization, operations and technologies (O-O-T) and not the other way round (T-O-O). Of course, these three steps should not be considered completely sequential, as technology plays an important role in the organization and the operations. However, it is essential to support the development of personnel and frameworks to take full advantage of the transformation opportunity, rather than primarily focusing on the tooling.

In addition, at Google Cloud, we believe in a shared fate that goes far beyond the usual shared responsibility model. We think it is part of our duty to help our customers to achieve their goals in their scope of responsibility. We prepare secure landing zones and guide the customers, we bring transparency to security controls and help them with cyber-insurance.

Our shared objective with our customers is to continuously improve security. Our Google Cybersecurity Action Team initiative helps us to be engaged alongside our customers, provide them with necessary guidance, support them in their security and compliance strategies, and assist their organizational and operational transformation in their cloud journey.