Transcript
Transcript: Unlocking the Potential of Cloud: Adopting an Agile Approach
[00:00:00 The text "Unlocking the Potential of Cloud – Agile Organizations" appears onscreen.]
[00:00:07 The screen fades to Tom Roberts in a video chat panel.]
TOM ROBERTS (Vice President, Business Enablement and Assurance Services Branch, Canada School of Public Service/Vice-prèsident, services d'affaires et d'appui aux organisations, École de la function publique du Canada): Cloud technology allows your business to thrive and it allows it to thrive more rapidly.
So, imagine that your business team wants just like a minimum viable product and they're using agile sprints to deliver on the business requirements. If your IT developers and infrastructure teams still operate in a traditional manner, your business folks will have to complete all of their agile sprints just to define the business and the technical requirements before your technical team can really start rolling up their sleeves and delivering on their part.
So, it's not only a business need to be agile, it's also an IT need to be agile. The whole organization, including security and software engineers, need to be agile. They need to be adequately equipped to support an iterative and incremental approach to delivering on business outcomes. So, not to put too fine a point on it, but the era of the big bang delivery model, it's dead right? I think we can all agree with that.
So, think about it, the average lifespan of software, a version of software, is six to eight years. So, imagine the old world where we would take two to four years to develop something and launch it. By the time you're actually live, you've waited years. Half of its lifespan, it's useful lifespan, is already done. You're just waiting for it to become irrelevant.
So, not only should we be agile but we should be also constantly improving and aligning with the latest technologies available. So, this way, your software means technology relevant and it also evolves with the ongoing business needs, and that's where cloud comes in. That's where SaaS, software as a service, comes in.
So, cloud solutions enable your technical and your project teams to fully leverage automated tools that folks will call DevOps. I'll use some jargony words that even I don't totally understand because they're more complicated than my brain allows for, but the DevOps tools allow for your software and your hardware teams to provide iterative and continuous delivery of your backend systems.
So, the DevOps pipelines are all about automating your processes, allowing your developers and operations to deploy software code or infrastructure changes, like almost instantly.
And now, what used to take months to set up an infrastructure can now be done in days, although I will caution a little bit. There's a difference between what you can do in days in an unprotected environment for unclassified information and what it takes to actually meet security standards in government. These are two different things.
But if you're looking for minimum viable products, you don't have to have secure information in there. You can move very, very quickly.
[00:02:20 The video chat fades to the CSPS logo.]
[00:02:27 The Government of Canada logo appears and fades to black.]
