Bhaskar Ramashandran: The cloud journey here at PPG is the result of lessons learned from my roles prior to PPG. Everyone talks about ‘cloud first.’ The problem with cloud first is it leaves a lot of room for interpretation, and every large organization has pockets that have little incentive to make a change. Those pockets resist the pronounced change, and cloud first becomes less effective.
Because of that, at PPG we changed it to ‘cloud only.’ There is no room for interpretation when it’s cloud only. ‘Only’ makes the mission extremely clear: This is what we are going to do, and this is all we are going to do. That moves the organization. There will always be a small group that thinks this is a fad, this will go away, but once you start gaining momentum, that fades away fairly quickly, because there is no alternative.
Then you start measuring it on a week-to-week basis, and you talk about it. ‘This week, we shut down X number of servers.’ That’s the level of granularity we track this with. I can pull up a Power BI chart that’s updated live when servers go down, when workloads go down, that tells me the status is 93.7%, which is what it was when I checked it last. In reality, we are at about 97%, but for one reason or another, the old servers haven’t been powered down, so they don’t get credit for it until they do that. Workload is out, but the server still has its lights on.
