Cloud and infrastructure programmes structured so they land

Cloud programmes are not a landing because a platform exists. They land when the estate can move, the run cost is honest, and operations can run what has been built on Monday.

At Rank Group, Darwin took Grosvenor and Mecca’s digital estate off a Guernsey OpenBet platform and onto Azure, with Bede. £12 million CAPEX. Live on 29 February 2016. The Guernsey data centre was gone in eight weeks. At Philip Morris International, a new Azure platform for a UK-based global group sat next to a vendor transition from Accenture and IBM to Infosys — about 150 people — without losing the operational thread.

At SSE, Direct Internet Access and PKI-as-a-service were there so the estate could actually move to Azure, and the DIA work was structured to cut run cost. At Thames Water, via Sagacity, phase one of a risk-based customer segmentation programme had Equifax in the data path and Azure underneath. At Mitchells & Butlers, a delayed Fujitsu-outsourced estate had to find a first solid landing, then a cloud-first Azure proposal.

RAID’s programme management treats infrastructure as part of the landing, not a workstream that reports later. Sequencing and readiness before theatre.