12 Steps to Get Started with the Cloud
by Jonathan Allen
"The hardest thing about getting started is getting started." — Guy Kawasaki
Executives are under increasing pressure to deliver Cloud transformation results quickly. Getting fully
setup for success should not stop you from getting going. That said, understanding lessons learned from
those who have gone before saves time and money.
As an enterprise strategist for Amazon Web Services, I currently travel around the globe helping the
largest companies in the world discover and unlock the power of AWS Cloud. Having lived the journey to
cloud and worked with countless customers, I find executives are always keen to understand what
lessons they can learn from those who have gone before. With the benefit of hindsight here are 12 steps
to get going when starting, that consistently deliver results:
Step 1 — Don't Over-Think It; Assign a Developer and start!
Just start. Focus on developing the skills and then delivering. All the help you'll need is available. And all
the answers to your questions have already been written. Start with one forward thinking Engineer or
Developer and have them start using AWS through the Console, get to know the services and spin up an
EC2 test instance. From my own journey we started with a very small team of forward leaning engineers,
the early lessons they harvested, compounded and continually informed our journey.
