I read the recently released Accelerate: State of DevOps 2018: Strategies for a New Economy report and was intrigued to see that respondents with cloud implementations that met the five essential characteristics of cloud, as defined by NIST(National Institute of Standards and Technology), were an astonishing 23 times more likely to be in their group of elite performers (a subset of their high performers who are achieving the highest levels of both speed and stability) than in the lower performing groups.

Unsurprisingly they also found that only 22% of respondents had implementations that met these characteristics. Therefore there is a massive portion of companies are merely ticking a box in terms of cloud usage but failing to leverage the many capabilities of the cloud.

I see companies treating the cloud as just another data center with hardware provisioning and networking requirements being managed through ticketing systems.

In this fusion talk I would like to share some of the misuses of the cloud I have seen and then focus on the five essential characteristics of cloud with the aim of imparting the importance of adopting these characteristics to improve performance.