What is AI for Local Government

I’m going to provide some examples that are beyond the typical use cases of writing emails, summarizing content, and creating images. Gen AI is poised to transform local government to become more efficient, effective, and responsive to constituent needs. Below we’ll explore some specific ways to use it.

I’m going to assume you already have a baseline understanding of Gen AI. If not, here’s an explanation from Gemini.

Please consider adding your thoughts to the conversation in the comments section. It’s an important time of innovation and the more voices we have in the conversation, the better.

Moving Beyond the Obvious Use Cases

While summarizing content and drafting documents are common applications of the Gen AI we see today with Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, the technology’s potential extends far beyond these basic tasks. And we should expect both the capabilities and applications of AI to rapidly evolve over the next 12-24 months. Here are some areas where local governments can leverage AI today:

1. Enhance Citizen Engagement to Build Stronger Communities

Create personalized communication channels, develop interactive citizen feedback mechanisms, and analyze sentiment to better understand community needs. Gen AI provides an opportunity for citizens to have 24/7/365 access to their local government through intelligent agents that can help them get the answers they need, apply for licenses, and pay taxes. Let’s be honest, interacting with the government is not always easy, and can be frustrating. There are a lot of departments, forms and processes to follow. What if citizens had an intelligent agent guiding them through these processes? How can anonymized data be used to better understand the needs of our communities? What if government workers were assisted by Gen AI to provide better customer service? I bet engagement and sentiment would improve significantly. These things are all possible today with Gen AI.

2. Fostering Innovation and Economic Growth

Gen AI can be a catalyst for innovation and economic growth within local communities. By analyzing economic data, identifying emerging trends, and assessing potential market opportunities, Gen AI can help local governments attract new businesses, foster entrepreneurship, and build a thriving economic ecosystem. Let’s say you need to do some economic analysis for a proposed factory coming to town or a new development project. What will be the impacts on local resources such as housing, public safety, schools, roads, utilities, etc? These scenario based questions are perfect for Gen AI to assist with developing plans for how to best allocate and optimize resources to maximize outcomes. Gen AI can perform this kind of situational analysis 100x faster and with far more nuance.

3. Empower Data-Driven Decision-Making

AI tools can analyze complex datasets, gain insights into trends and patterns, and inform evidence-based policy decisions. Even small local governments possess a lot of data, making it challenging to extract meaningful insights and inform strategic decisions. Gen AI can help you explore data more thoroughly and make connections that once were hidden or too complex to find. It’s much more capable and quick to find patterns, trends, and outliers that would otherwise be lost. Think about the effort of evaluating historical data, resident feedback, policies, regulations, economic data, and more all on your own. We’re talking about a force multiplier in leveraging data for decisions with the aid of Gen AI.

4. Search, Discovery and Understanding

Local governments generate loads of paperwork, physical and digital. Gen AI supercharges search and discovery across your corpus of data. And training private LLM’s that help staff discover and build understanding about the contents of your data is a powerful use case. For example, what if someone is asking about building permits for an addition to their home and wants to understand the building codes. AI-based search and conversation experiences, once arduous tasks, can be done in hours and days vs. weeks and months.

5. Enhancing Cybersecurity

Local governments are among the top targets for cyber criminals today. Unfortunately they’ve found local governments to be a target rich environment with juicy data that’s not as secure as it should be. There have been a number of incidents of ransomware attacks against local governments. Gen AI enhances the cybersecurity posture for local governments who aren’t able to hire enough skilled workers to play security offense and defense. There are specific LLM’s trained on security data that can monitor, detect, and help workers respond to an attack. Again, another example of a “sidecar” AI approach where it’s assisting humans to be 10-100x more productive, and filling in skill gaps.

Key Takeaways for Mayors and Commissioners

We are in the early days, but there are practical applications to be deployed now. This is an exciting journey that’s evolving before our eyes. So what are the important things to get right at the onset? Let’s take a look.

Establish Clear AI Governance

Develop policies and procedures that guide the responsible and ethical use of AI within your organization. Address issues such as data privacy, bias, and model explainability. There are already great examples of this emerging from state and federal leaders, as well as technology companies. No need to completely recreate the wheel. Here are some examples:

• Federal Executive Order 2023
• NIST AI Framework
• State of Utah
• State of Pennsylvania
• State of New Jersey
• City of Boston
• City of San Jose
• Google AI Principles
• OpenAI Safety Standards

Invest in AI Education and Training

Provide opportunities for your staff to learn about AI’s capabilities and limitations. Encourage them to experiment with AI tools and share their experiences with colleagues. Be clear about what should and should not be input into consumer tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. There’s a clear line between private/secure AI and consumer products.

Embrace AI for Innovation

Explore how generative AI can transform your municipality’s operations, from improving public service delivery to enhancing citizen engagement. Connect with AI experts and partners to identify and implement innovative solutions. Experiment safely. We learn from trying, failing fast, and iterating. And there are ways to do that experimentation process without compromising data privacy and security. So, local leaders should lean into this technology and get curious about it. Make it a priority to figure out how to leverage it for good.

A word of caution about AI tools

I realize this post is optimistic. That’s my intent and my own perspective. We do need to acknowledge the risks. With any technology, new and old, there are risks and trade offs to consider. I will be writing a follow up piece to address the risks associated with Gen AI, specific to local government. So check back soon.

For now though, be thinking about data custody. When you use AI, do you know where your data is going? I don’t mean to pick on one tool, but for the sake of example I’m going to. Otter.ai is a popular tool that transcribes web meetings like Zoom and Google Meet. An AI joins the call, transcribes the conversation, then summarizes it in notes. Now go take a look at Otter’s terms of service. It uses several third party processors, so you very quickly realize how your data can be spread outside of your control. That’s clearly problematic. Thankfully, enterprise systems already exist to empower organizations to deploy AI responsibly and maintain control around how data is being used, where it’s stored, and that you have true custody of it.

Onward

The pace of innovation is unprecedented. Just today Google announced Gemini 1.0, another leap forward in AI. Gemini is multimodal (text, code, images, video), capable of reasoning, and outperforms humans on many complex tasks. Continue to expect rapid advancements, but don’t miss the opportunities now.

Hopefully the examples above, while not exhaustive and only high level, show how Generative AI holds immense potential to transform local government operations, citizen engagement and experience. I believe by embracing AI responsibly, municipalities and county governments can enhance their ability to serve their communities effectively and efficiently. It’s an exciting time to be alive.

What do you think? Do you agree or disagree with the potential of Gen AI in governments? What other use cases do you see? We need more local government leaders engaged in dialog about innovation to drive outcomes. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

AI use disclosure: I used Gemini and ChatGPT to edit this post and as a creative assistant to flesh out some of my thoughts around the use cases. DALL-E was used to create the cover image with the prompt “I need cover art for a blog post titled “Generative AI: A Practical Guide for Local Government Transformation”

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If you find yourself in this situation, fret not! There are ways to bridge the gap between Google Workspace and Microsoft Office 365, enabling seamless collaboration and productivity. I wrote this post to walk you through the process of creating a free Google account using your work email, allowing you to interact seamlessly with Google Docs, Sheets, and other Workspace applications.

So if you already have a work email address, you can use it to create a free Google account. This is a great way to keep your personal and work email separate. Here’s a video on how to do it, with written instructions below.

Here are the steps on how to create a free Google account with your work email:

1. Go to the Google Accounts sign up page, enter your name and click “Next”.
   
2. Check your work email for a verification code and enter it on the next screen.
   
3. Finish the process by filling out the required information and creating a password for your new Google account.

Once you have completed these steps, you will have a free Google account that is associated with your work email address. You can now use this account to access Google services. Access will be for the essentials only. But this is much better, and more secure, than using your personal Google accounts in a work setting.

I hope this blog post has been helpful. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below.

The post How to Create a Free Google Account with Your Work Email appeared first on Eric Clark.

UPDATE Oct 2025: This process works like a charm in the latest macOS release Tahoe (v26). Also works in macOS Sequoia (v15), Sonoma (v13), Ventura (v13), Monterey (v12), Big Sur (v11), Catalina (v10.15), and earlier versions of macOS v10.

I have been using the stationery feature in Apple Mail as a way to create reusable email templates for quite some time now. It’s been a time saver! Unfortunately, Apple removed the stationery feature from the Mail app with the update in macOS Mojave. Now what? Check out the video tutorial and the instructions below.

Steps to create an email template

1. Create a new email message. You can populate the To, Cc, Bcc, Subject and Body of the email with whatever you need to be part of your template. Formatting (bold, colors, etc.) all work fine. You can even add pictures and attachments as part of your template.
2. Save the draft message. Close the draft and you will be prompted to save it.
3. Create a new email folder called “Templates”. You can call it whatever you want, but this will be the home for all of your template messages.
4. Move your draft message to the Templates folder. Right click on the draft, then select “Move to” and pick your Templates folder. NOTE: Dragging and dropping the draft to the Templates folder only seems to work with iCloud, so I suggest using the right-click method.
5. In the Templates folder, right click on the message you want to use as a template and click “Send again”. The message will open as an editable message, so you can tweak and personalize it before sending it. The original is left in the Templates folder so you can reuse it again and again.

Quick and easy! I have found that this solution is even better than it was before with the stationery feature in older versions of the Mail App. 

How to edit email templates

One more thing. What if you want to edit your email templates? It’s a great question, because you can’t edit them in the Templates folder. So here’s what you need to do:

1. Drag and drop your template from the Templates folder to the Drafts folder.
2. Open the message from the Drafts folder to edit it.
3. Save your changes and then drag the message back to the Templates folder.

You might be wondering, why not just leave all of my reusable email templates in the Drafts folder. Great question. Unfortunately, the “Send again” option doesn’t exist in the Drafts folder. As soon as you send a draft email it’s gone. Not very reusable. Plus, I think it’s cleaner to keep templates separate in their own special folder.

I hope you found this helpful and saves you time. Please leave a comment below to share about your Apple Mail hacks and time saving tips.

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How to migrate from OneNote to Apple Notes

In summary, the process has three major steps.

1. Use Evernote to import notes from OneNote, one section at a time
2. Export Evernote .enex files for each previous OneNote section. (In Evernote the equivalent is a “notebook”)
3. Import .enex files in Apple Notes

Yes, we’re actually using a third tool, Evernote, to make this happen. Unfortunately OneNote doesn’t provide a viable export option that you can use with Apple Notes. However, Evernote has a built in tool to migrate files from OneNote. And since Evernote is more flexible in its export process, you can actually use it to convert your OneNote notes to a format (.enex) that Apple Notes can import.

Post Mortem after the Migration

Here are some lessons learned after migrated to Apple Notes.

The Good

• Syncing between devices is faster and more reliable
• Apple Notes strikes a great blend between simplicity and useful features. It’s not cluttered.
• Drawing tools are better
• Dark mode implementation is better
• 2021 update: Apple Notes now supports #tags which is great for more advanced organization

The Bad (or Annoying)

• No back/forward buttons to navigate between notes
• Search is somewhat limited. I wish Apple Notes had smart folders so I could quickly find things like the most recently edited notes across all folders.
• There’s no way to link between different notes

Overall, the move to Apple Notes has been a good one. For me, having a simplified interface and reliable syncing between my Apple devices is key. I don’t miss all the extra bells and whistles of OneNote.

My Journey from Evernote to OneNote to Apple Notes

My journey with digital note-taking has been a storied one. The first note-taking tool I ever committed to was Evernote back in 2009. Evernote captured the lion share of the note-taking market for several years. It was red hot and became ubiquitous for note-taking.

By 2014 I had written over 1,500 notes in Evernote. But then something happened. Evernote was starting to lag behind competition. They also launched a paid service, but the offering wasn’t compelling enough for me to pay. Then, innovation at Evernote seemed to just … stop. The product felt stagnant. I couldn’t reconcile how monetizing their app didn’t result in any meaningful enhancements for users. Evernote lost their way.

Then in 2015 Microsoft began offering OneNote for free (PC, Mac and mobile). A shot at Evernote? Probably yeah. They saw an opportunity while Evernote struggled. I’ve never been a Microsoft fanboy. But around this timeframe under Satya Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft was changing and evolving (and continues to) in ways that had great benefits for consumers. Making OneNote free was one of those changes.

So I decided to migrate from Evernote to OneNote. I went all in and didn’t look back. Migrating my notes over to OneNote was actually pretty darn smooth. In a couple of hours I was up and running.

Fast forward to 2020. After using OneNote for a few years I realized two things that ultimately led me to search for (another!) a replacement.

1. Too many features can distract you from taking good notes. OneNote is great if you like tons and tons of features and flexibility. But if you’re looking for simplicity, then it’s probably not for you.
2. Syncing was always a bit wonky and writing notes on my iPhone was never smooth. The note syncing was inconsistent and slow. My OneNote file was stored in OneDrive and I always found it strange (and frustrating) when my notes would not sync quickly with my laptop. And the mobile experience on iPhone has issues with editing. The fonts would change mid note (what?!). There was keyboard incompatibility, especially with swipe. Weird things like that. These issues interfered enough with my workflow to make me consider alternatives… again.

If you’re considering migrating to Apple Notes Ihope you find this helpful! The process, while a little cumbersome, really isn’t that bad. Good luck!

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Here’s the thing. Cloud services, although they’ve been around for over a decade, are not always properly optimized. In this post I’ll share some common causes and how to fix them.

The main problem I see my customers struggle with is that they have shifted over their workloads, but haven’t shifted into a cloud mindset. A mindset of understanding highly configurable, ephemeral, auto-scaling, on-demand, and just-in-time infrastructure. And a mindset of having more control and governance capabilities than ever before, especially over cost control.

Yes, we’re 10+ years in with cloud adoption. But mainstream adoption has just taken off in the last few years. Large enterprises were reluctant to jump in at first, mostly because of existing capital expenditures and concerns about using nascent technology. That’s changing now.

For example, here’s a look at the popularity of the search term “public cloud” since 2004.

New things take time to permeate and reach mainstream adoption. Especially with something as broad and transformational as cloud computing. Generally speaking, if you’re changing how and where you run your infrastructure, that’s a big undertaking on several fronts. These are big decisions.

People are playing catch-up when it comes to learning new skills. A new way of doing things. A new way of thinking. I suspect this will be the case stretching into 2022. Leaving lots of room for optimization work along the way. Here’s an example.

One Simple Example – Over Provisioning

This is the most boring charts of all time, but there’s an interesting story behind it. It shows average CPU utilization for a fleet of EC2 instances in AWS over a two week period.

Below 5% CPU utilization on average. This client was spending wasting so much on compute capacity they didn’t need. Over provisioned. The result:

How did this happen? Because they lifted and shifted workloads over without leveraging the highly optimizable features of cloud resources. The mixture of auto-scaling rules, right-sized EC2 instances, and some reservations made a huge impact on reducing the overall monthly spend.

Unfortunately, I see this a lot. Again, it’s a mindset shift to realize that you have more control and more levers to pull when it comes to fine tuning your infrastructure. Which can translate into extremely optimized cloud spend for those that spend time getting it right.

Why Are Some Companies Spending Too Much?

Considering the above example, which addresses how the issue happened, let’s consider the root causes for why it happens. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but these are common issues I’ve encountered.

• You moved too fast – The decree came down like this. “We need to move to the cloud now!” And so you did. With the best intentions, you said you’d optimize things later. Yet, here you are months (maybe years!) later and you’ve done no such optimization.
• Lack of skills – You moved workloads without knowing how to properly take advantage of cloud resources. Your staff isn’t aware of how to optimize properly. They’re stuck in an old way of thinking.
• Lack of visibility – You don’t know how to track spending month to month, annually, projected spend, etc. You don’t have a trusted single source showing you trends and projections, and offering suggestions for improvements.
• Lack of controls – Cloud resources are very easy to consume. If you don’t have controls in place, things are bound to sprawl. It starts out with one department dabbling in AWS. Another in Azure. And another in Google Cloud. Before you know it, you have a spaghetti bowl of cloud services with no clear route back to health, stability and control.

How To Fix the Common Issues

The good news is it’s not too late to make decisions and improve your position. You can get things back under control quickly. Remember, we’re not dealing with significant capital expenses (for the most part). You can make changes and see real results, sometimes in hours or days.

1. Understand What You’ve Got

Work with someone you can trust. Preferably an outside consultant that’s not part of your organization. This will ensure that you get an objective and holistic review and recommendations.

Let’s be honest, who on your team internally wants to admit that the things they’ve been working on aren’t optimized and are causing the company to waste money. Get a third-party trusted advisor to help you. In fact, this is a service I offer. Ping me if you need some help.

2. Remediate the Biggest Issues

After a review of your account, you should have an actionable list of the biggest “bang for your buck” optimizations you need to make. Typical issues include over provisioned compute, poor architecture, incorrect use of storage classes, and not using cloud services such as serverless technology.

We’re focused on cost in this post, but there are other aspects that are important to consider. Optimization can and should happen around performance, reliability, security and operational excellence – which tend to translate into cost savings.

Again, find a partner you can trust to help you understand your current reality and provide a prioritized list of actionable recommendations. Tackle the big things first. 20% of the issues likely improve 80% of your cloud spend.

3. Level-Up Your Staff and Tweak as You Go

So far I’ve suggested finding a trusted partner to help. I stand by this recommendation. Unless you have the skills in-house and you can receive an objective review from within. If you can do it, go for it!

People make it all happen. Make sure your staff understands the vision of why you’re in the cloud and how important it is to the business. No matter what skill level you have in-house to handle your cloud services going forward, get people the ongoing training they need.

New cloud services and features are implemented frequently. To the tune of 1,000+ per year in AWS alone. This means you will never be done tweaking, and that’s a good thing. Take advantage of it. You can’t afford not to!

Thanks for reading this post. I hope you found it helpful. What is your #1 biggest challenge when it comes to controlling your cloud spend? Leave a reply in the comments below.

The post Your Cloud Spend is Out of Control: How to Take Charge appeared first on Eric Clark.

The use cases and consumption of cloud services can vary quite a bit from organization to organization. And the motivation to adopt cloud services can be driven by lots of different priorities. Based on my experience working with many different customers, these are the key reasons why organizations need cloud services today.

Reduce Costs

Yes, this is possible. If you do it right. Some people argue that the cloud is more expensive. I say hogwash – it doesn’t have to be. You will incur more expense if you don’t have a strategy and a plan to leverage cloud resources appropriately. For instance, when you lift and shift your infrastructure to the cloud without optimization, then yes, it’s going to be painfully expensive.

However, for those that spend time doing things right, by planning how to properly leverage cloud resources with the proper controls and automation in place, you can save money. Lot’s of money.

Improve Reliability

Unless you have a virtually unlimited budget you will be hard-pressed to create resiliency that compares to that of the modern cloud. Companies who want to improve their reliability and disaster recovery options often look to cloud services for those answers. AWS and Azure both offer incredible multi-region, multi-zone infrastructure. Accomplish reliability goals that were once only dreams. Today you can deploy fault tolerant apps and services within a very short amount of time. Here we are years after cloud has become mainstream, yet this benefit is still something to marvel at.

Improve Performance

The ability to scale at will and at the right times is a big benefit. Before the cloud you would have to purchase and provision infrastructure capable of meeting that type of demand and capacity. Which is typically a CapEx sunk cost, and then you have dormant capacity for the rest of the year. What. A. Waste.

For example, take the need to scale operations for retail eCommerce around the holidays. Cloud services allow incredible flexibility to do so with basically an infinite amount of scaling capacity. The old way ended up wasting a lot of resources that you only needed for short bursts of time. The new way gives you just the right amount of performance only when you need it most.

Improve Security

To implement security measures, physical and digital, to protect core cloud infrastructure would cost an arm and a leg. Very few organizations can take on such a task. As AWS famously states, they are responsible for security of the cloud and you are responsible for security in the cloud.

Cloud providers carry the burden of the core cloud infrastructure (physical and virtual). Good news! Now you don’t have to worry about it. Cloud consumers are responsible for what they do in the cloud and have more control and options than ever before.

Here’s one example that has come into focus in recent years; privacy and data sovereignty. You can address key data privacy concerns by leveraging other geographical regions of the cloud. That will help you comply with data sovereignty requirements. Imagine the cost involved in deploying your own data center or co-location space in another country to meet this need. It wasn’t very long ago that people still did that (in fact some still do). Today, it’s a matter of configuration without ever having to leave your country. Or your seat.

Improve Overall Efficiency

Deploying and consuming cloud resources quickly gives companies great flexibility to try new things with almost no lead time. Automation is key here. Think about this. The ability to script out your infrastructure (Infrastructure as Code) and deploy it within minutes to different regions is pretty incredible. Not to mention the benefit of versioning your infrastructure changes over time.

There are tons of other advantages in the efficiency category. Here are a few of my favorites. Automating changes, self-healing infrastructure, monitoring and reporting leading to better visibility and control of your environment, and the DevOps culture of continual improvement.

Increase Innovation

All of the points above can help you achieve specific goals for your organization. Holistically, these benefits (or reasons for using cloud services) allow you to innovate like never before. Here’s a few examples:

• You can test things more quickly without incurring much expense
• Launch new solutions in record time and not have to compromise on security
• Tap into powerful services with ease that would have been nearly impossible a decade ago

Conclusion

The above points are summarizations of things I hear from all types of customers exploring cloud services. It’s not an exhaustive or in-depth list. Nor is it meant to be. But it provides some of the most common reasons why any organization would be interested in the cloud. My list is also heavily influenced by the excellent well-architected framework by Amazon Web Services. I hope you found this useful! You can read my answer to this same question on Quora too.

By the way, I help customers by providing objective assessments of their AWS environment(s). You will receive a well formatted document highlighting key areas of your account and recommendations to improve security, cost, performance and reliability. In most cases customers have ROI on this service within weeks and we uncover things they had no idea were going on in their environment. Check out my services page for more info.

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Welcome to Season 2 of The Tech Execs! After reviewing listener feedback, we are pivoting the Tech Execs to focus on up and coming technology workers, looking to break their way into technology and management. In our seventh episode, we discuss one of the most powerful tools of building a career: networking.

The Three Paradoxes of Networking

While many pay lip service to the power of networking, not many follow through to make it a habit. Networking, when effectively executed, is the closest thing to magic in the business world. It leads to the greatest opportunities while allowing you to contribute to your network.

However, to get great results, you have to respect the three paradoxes of networking. Approach networking with common knowledge and you’ll get mediocre results. Approach networking with a different approach, and great opportunities will appear at every turn.

Paradox One: Despite wanting to benefit yourself, you have to be altruistic in your networking

Your goal 95% of the the time when effectively networking with others is to figure out how to help as much as possible. People who network just to benefit themselves rarely grow big networks and almost never find that one in a hundred opportunity that leads to great results. When networking, know what will help you, but always be on the lookout to help others.

Paradox Two: Despite having ‘networking’ events, networking needs to become a habitual habit

Most people treat networking as an event… something you do after work once a quarter because your boss said it would be good for you. The best networkers find a way to always network in their life. Whether that’s through answer messages on LinkedIn, reaching out to people on meetup.com or just emailing someone for coffee, the best networkers find a way to make networking habitual and instinctual.

Paradox Three: Despite being altruistic, you need to treat networking like a business

You normally think of marketing as an activity relegated to business, but in networking, treating yourself like a business is one of the most important steps to making progress. If you try to wait around for someone to network with you, you’ll be lonely and not making much progress. If you learn to effectively message people through cold emails and warm introductions, you’ll begin to make a lot more progress. These technical details seem like things only businesses do, but the best networkers treat their networks like a business.

Conclusion

Thank you for joining us today. If you would like us to discuss a topic on The Tech Execs or have a question for us, please send an email to us at answers@thetechexecs.com. We want to hear about the problems you are experiencing and give you guidance on how to best approach those issues.

The post Session 7 – Building a career in IT and the power of networking appeared first on Eric Clark.

This week is the third part of a three part mini-series called ‘Don’t Lift and Shift and Stop’, talking about how to move your organization to the cloud. In this final episode of this three part series, we discuss the aspirational side of cloud computing: refactoring your system to use the latest and great technology. We’ll take you through the important questions for your team to ask if you want to get the absolute most of your cloud computer services.

Let’s orient with the big picture considering the various different paths to the cloud. Today is all about the orange line (refactoring):

Important Questions to Ask When Refactoring

What are some ways that the current automation technologies can help improve your infrastructure?

Automation is one of the best ways to simplify your cloud computing platform. By making a system that automates the messy processes of deployment and code update. Common technology in this field includes:

• Terraform Scripting
• Code Deploy
• TeamCity/GO CD
• Docker Deployment
• Lambda Scripting

In what way can you use cloud services to refactor and improve your infrastructure?

Sometimes, the easiest way to improve your infrastructure is to completely move to a managed service that simplifies the process of deployment and maintenance. Both AWS and Azure are offering a robust set of services to make infrastructure easier to maintain. Common technology in this field includes:

• Data Pipeline
• RedShift
• DynamoDB
• Step Functions

Conclusion

That’s it for this three part mini-series. If you missed the others, check them out!

• Session 4 – The quickest path to the cloud: Lift and Shift
• Session 5 – Benefits of Re-platforming

We hope you enjoyed learning about how you can better yourself and your organization through better cloud computing utilization. If you would like us to discuss a topic on The Tech Execs or have a question for us, please send an email to us at answers@thetechexecs.com. We want to hear the tech management problems you are experiencing and give you guidance on how to solve those problem

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Welcome to the Tech Execs, where we discuss new and emergent technologies to help executives manage their organizations. This week is the second part of a three part mini-series, talking about how to move your organization to the cloud. Whether you’re just getting started or looking to take advantage of the latest cloud technology, there are many advantages to be had by the cloud.

The name of this series is ‘Don’t Lift and Shift and Stop’, focusing on how you can continually improve on your cloud strategy, even after years of being cloud first. In today’s episode, we discuss how to re-platform to optimize your cloud infrastructure to get your organization on the leading edge of what cloud can offer today. We’ll be discussing things like automation, DevOps best practices and effectively using AWS Services.

To get oriented, this image shows the many paths you might take to get to the cloud. We’re focusing on the yellow line.

And as you can see, when we move up the scale to re-platforming, our effort increases but so does our ability to make better use of cloud technology.

Critical Questions in Extending Your Cloud Operations

How can we decrease the number of servers our organization must maintain?

Each server your organization must maintain is another set of structural costs that could be eliminated. For every one database, you organization needs a strategy to optimize the networking, administer the operating system and hardware management. But with cloud managed services, like Amazon RDS, you can re-platform to off-load that management and just focus on the thing that really matters to your business.

AWS and Azure are beginning to offer more and more managed services like these to make your organization run leaner.

How can we decrease the number of man hours necessary to complete tasks?

When working in an old-school infrastructure mentality, there is a compulsion to try to have every step managed and man by an individual or team to make sure the process runs well. When hardware and software in computers was more faulty, this was necessary to confirm that processes complete. With re-platforming on the cloud, many of these processes are unnecessary, wasting many more man hours that could be spent on other important development task. Cloud deployments can be done at the push of a button and automatically push to your environment.

Tools like this can help developers spend less time on getting their code running and more time developing it, saving your organization time and money.

How can we decrease the number of hours needs to get infrastructure in a stable state?

In the same vein, infrastructure has historically been a very time intensive procedure. Provisioning a new server would often been a multi-week (or sometimes months) process to get all the hardware and software available for use. Cloud has helped make these steps many times faster, but many teams still feel the need to do things manually. With Development Operations tools, infrastructure can be boiled down to a series of scripts, allowing your team to manage infrastructure the same way they manage code. This is blurring the line between re-platforming and operational tasks, but that’s actually an important point in your cloud journey. Blurred lines can be a very good thing for your organization.

By moving your infrastructure from manual process to code, you allow your team to focus on how to build better systems and processes for your organization.

Conclusion

That’s it for today’s topic on the benefits of re-platforming. If you missed last week’s episode about the quickest way to get to the cloud, check it out here. Next week, we will be discussing the aspirational side of what cloud has to offer. With all the advancements that have taken place, what could be coming next? In next week’s final episode of this three part series, we’ll discuss what the future of cloud technology looks like and how your organization can take advantage of that today.

If you would like us to discuss a topic on The Tech Execs or have a question for us, please send an email to us at answers@thetechexecs.com. We want to hear the tech management problems you are experiencing and give you guidance on how to solve those problems.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

Amazon Connect – Cloud-based Contact Center

The post Session 5 – Don’t lift and shift and stop: Benefits of Re-platforming appeared first on Eric Clark.

Welcome to the Tech Execs, where we discuss new and emergent technologies to help executives manage their organizations. This week is the beginning of a three part mini-series called‘Don’t Lift and Shift and Stop’, talking about how to move your organization to the cloud AND continually improve your cloud strategy. Whether you’re just getting started or looking to take advantage of the latest cloud technology, there are many advantages to be had by the cloud.

In this episode, we are going to be clearing up some misconceptions about cloud strategy and talk about how you can move into the cloud quickly while setting yourself up for long-term success.

Typically the quickest way to get to the could is a lift and shift migration approach. This is mainly a one for one match from one infrastructure to another. There are some reasons why this option is considered, but that’s not the focus of this episode. We want to arm you with some key questions to ask early on in your cloud journey. There are some mind shifts that need to happen as you adopt cloud technology. We’ll get into more of that in the next two episodes.

To orient us over the next three episodes, we’re going to talk about all three of the options below, starting with Lift and Shift.

4 key questions to ask your organization before you lift and shift

When you’re considering moving infrastructure to the cloud you have a lot to consider. It’s more than simply lifting and shifting your workloads. It’s a chance to innovate and optimize. Below are some key questions that will help you along in your journey.

How will you organization handle billing concerns?

One of the hardest things about moving to the cloud is also one of the best things: being able to quickly and easily spin up new infrastructure and services for your growing organization. It’s easy to get started, but it’s also easy to lose control of your costs. Without a proper strategy on who is responsible for which costs, you could be managing an organization with thousands of dollars of un-trackable costs.

How will you distribute control and access over your organization?

When moving to the cloud, you make it a lot easier for people of a larger skillset to use cloud tools. However, organizations fall into one of two ‘extremes’: giving only control to those who have traditionally had access to it (Operations) or giving access to all requests. In the former, you don’t get any of the advantages of moving to the cloud, artificially reducing innovation. In the later, you run the risk of running up extreme costs in the organization. So as you move to the cloud, you have to ask what the appropriate level of control is for your business and how you’re going to roll that our.

Who will be your cloud expert during the migration?

When making a transition to the cloud, many of your operations resources will feel either unqualified or left behind. However, our experience has shown that when moving to the cloud, most traditional operations personnel are more than capable of running a cloud first operation. When getting acquainted, they need the knowledge necessary to know how to do things in the cloud, but can handle most other problems experienced by the organization. Because of this, we recommend having an internal cloud expert or trusted partner who can be the technical go-to while the organization is getting up to speed on cloud. This is the best of both worlds as you do not have to hire a completely new team and they can get you working in the cloud fast.

Who will be managing the project timelines and plans?

As always, projects are only as good as their ability to be completed. When moving to the cloud, your organizations should have a clear understanding of when and how certain resources will be moved to the cloud and who is responsible for those actions. Giving your team the resources and accountability to make a change will put you in a good place to move forward.

That’s it for today’s topic. Next week, we will be discussing how to get the most out of your cloud adoption strategy once you’ve moved to the cloud and have been there for a while. This will cover the basics of how to innovate on your cloud infrastructure with the improvements we’ve recommended in this episode.

If you would like us to discuss a topic on The Tech Execs or have a question for us, please send an email to us at answers@thetechexecs.com. We want to hear the tech management problems you are experiencing and give you guidance on how to solve those problems.

The post Session 4 – Don’t lift and shift and stop: The quickest way to get to the cloud appeared first on Eric Clark.