{"id":8196,"date":"2022-06-22T14:05:03","date_gmt":"2022-06-22T21:05:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=8196"},"modified":"2023-06-11T13:55:13","modified_gmt":"2023-06-11T20:55:13","slug":"born-in-the-cloud-thinking-is-fueling-microsofts-transformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/born-in-the-cloud-thinking-is-fueling-microsofts-transformation\/","title":{"rendered":"How \u2018born in the cloud\u2019 thinking is fueling Microsoft\u2019s transformation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\"MicrosoftMicrosoft wasn\u2019t born in the cloud, but soon you won\u2019t be able to tell.<\/p>\n

Now that it has finished \u201clifting and shifting\u201d its massive internal workload to Microsoft Azure, the company is rethinking everything.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re rearchitecting all of our applications so that they work natively on Azure,\u201d says Pete Apple, principal service engineer on the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team. \u201cWe\u2019re retooling to take advantage of all that the cloud has to offer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Microsoft spent the last eight years moving the internal workload of its 60,000 on-premises servers to Azure. Thanks to early efforts to modernize some of that workload while migrating it, and to ruthlessly removing everything that wasn\u2019t being used, the company is now running about 8,500 virtual machines in Microsoft Azure. This number dynamically scales up to around 10,000 virtual machines when the company is processing extra work at the end of months, quarters, and years. It has less than 300 virtual machines on premises, most of which are there intentionally for support of physical labs. The company is now 99 percent in the cloud.<\/p>\n

Now that the company\u2019s cloud migration is done and dusted, it\u2019s Apple\u2019s job to craft a framework for transforming Microsoft into a born-in-the-cloud company. Microsoft Digital will then use that framework to retool all the applications and services that the organization uses to provide IT and operations services to the larger company.<\/p>\n

The job is bigger than building a guide for how the company will rebuild applications that support Human Resources, Finance, and so on. Apple\u2019s team has created a roadmap for how Microsoft will rearchitect those applications in a consistent, connected way that focuses on the end user experience while also<\/em> figuring out how to get the more than 3,000 engineers in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience who will rebuild those applications to embrace the modern engineering\u2013fueled cultural shift needed for this transformation to happen.<\/p>\n

[Take a deep dive into the learnings, pitfalls, and compromises of Microsoft\u2019s expedition to the cloud<\/a>. Discover implementing Azure cost optimization for the enterprise<\/a>. Explore how Microsoft is modernizing enterprise integration services using Azure<\/a>.<\/em>]<\/p>\n

Move to the cloud creates transformation opportunity<\/h2>\n

Despite good work by good people, Microsoft Digital\u2019s engineering model wasn\u2019t ready to scale to the demands of Microsoft\u2019s growth and how fast its internal businesses were evolving. Moving to the cloud created the perfect opportunity to fix it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the past, every project we worked on was delivered pretty much in isolation,\u201d Apple says. \u201cWe operated very much as a transaction team that worked directly for internal customers like Finance and HR.\u201d<\/p>\n

Microsoft Digital engineering was done externally through vendors who were not connected or incentivized to talk to each other. They would take their orders from the business group they were supporting, build what was asked for, get paid, and move on to the next project.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would spin up a new vendor team and just get the project done\u2014even if it was a duplication or a slight iteration on top of another project that already had been delivered,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s how we ended up with a couple of invoicing systems, a few financial reporting systems, and so on and so forth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lack of a larger strategy prevented Microsoft Digital from building applications that made sense for Microsoft employees.<\/p>\n

This made for a rough user experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cEach application had a different look and feel,\u201d Apple says. \u201cEach one had its own underlying structure and data system. Nothing was connected and data was replicated multiple times, all of which would create challenges around privacy, security, data freshness, etc.\u201d<\/p>\n

The problem was simple\u2014the team wasn\u2019t working against a strategy that let it push back at the right moments.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe word that the previous IT organization never really used was \u2018no,\u2019\u201d Apple says. \u201cThey felt like they had no choice in the matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

When moving to the cloud opens the door to transformation<\/h2>\n

The story is different today. Now Microsoft Digital has its own funding and is choosing which projects to build based on a strategic vision that outlines where it wants to take the company.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe conversation has completely shifted, not only because we have moved things to the cloud, but because we have taken a single, unified data strategy,\u201d Apple says. \u201cIt has altered how we engage with our internal customers in ways that were not possible when everything was on premises and one-off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now Microsoft Digital engineers are working in much smarter ways.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe now have agility around operating our internal systems that we could never have fathomed achieving on prem,\u201d he says. \u201cAgility from the point of view of elasticity, from the point of view of releases, of understanding how our workloads are being used and deriving insights from these workloads, but also agility from the point of view of reacting and adapting to the changing needs of our internal business partners in an extremely rapid manner because we have un-frictioned access to the data, to the signals, and to the metrics that tell us whether we are meeting the needs of our internal customers.\u201d<\/p>\n

And those business groups who unknowingly came and asked for something Microsoft Digital had already built?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe now have an end-to-end view of all the work we\u2019re doing across the company,\u201d Apple says. \u201cWe can correlate, we can match the patterns of issues and problems that our other internal customers have had, we can show them what could happen if they don\u2019t change their approach, and best of all, we can give them tips for improving in ways they never considered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Microsoft Digital\u2019s approach may have been flawed in the past, but there were lots of good reasons for that, Apple says. He won\u2019t minimize the work that Microsoft Digital engineers did to get Microsoft to the threshold of digitally transforming and moving to the cloud.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe skills and all of the things that made us successful as an IT organization before we started on a cloud journey are great,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019re what contributed to building the company and operating the company the way we have today.\u201d<\/p>\n

But now it\u2019s time for new approaches and new thinking.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe skills that are required to run our internal systems and services today in the cloud, those are completely different,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

As a result, the way the team operates, the way it interacts, and the way it engages with its internal customers have had to evolve.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe cultural journey that Microsoft Digital has been on is happening in parallel with our technical transformation,\u201d Apple continues. \u201cThe technical transformation and the cultural transformation could not have happened in isolation. They had to happen in concert, and to a large extent, they fueled each other as we arrived at what we can now articulate as our cloud-centric architecture.\u201d<\/p>\n

And about that word that people in Microsoft Digital were afraid to say? They\u2019re saying it now.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe word \u2018no\u2019 is now a very powerful word,\u201d Apple says. \u201cWhen a customer request comes in, the answer is \u2018yes, we\u2019ll prioritize it,\u2019 or \u2018no, this isn\u2019t the most important thing we can build for the company from a ROI standpoint, but here\u2019s what we can do instead.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The change has been empowering to all of Microsoft Digital.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe quality and the shape of the conversation has changed,\u201d he says. \u201cNow we in Microsoft Digital are uniquely positioned to take a step back and say, \u2018for the company, the most important thing for us to prioritize is this, let\u2019s go deliver on it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Related<\/p>\n