AI + Cloud Strategy

Craft and execute your future-ready strategy as you navigate the cloud journey in the Age of AI

We see it often: Organizations acquire mountains of technology without a strategy for putting it to work, resulting in a tangled, spaghetti web of odd tech and underperforming investment. Here’s the thing: Almost nobody is good at navigating a better path.

Very few are truly prepared to make the most of the AI wave crashing on their shore. Very few have done the hard work to build the cloud ecosystem with the kind of proper, modern data platform required to make the AI-infused cloud work at scale across their organization. And the grace period for organizations to get their act together and position themselves for the next wave is growing much shorter, the margin for error much narrower.

Your strategy must be flexible, able to absorb tomorrow what we don’t fully grasp today. Your strategy should offer value to the organization beyond specific workloads because the nature and value of these workloads will evolve over time.

This explains our fondness for the phrase “future-ready”, and why we cringe when we hear people say “future-proof”. The former describes a cloud ecosystem built with modern technologies using best practices that are most likely to absorb the future innovations that come our way. The latter is unachievable in all circumstances.

This is, we believe, the absolutely necessary work to ensuring that you do not find itself on the left-behind side of a two-tier economy wherein organizations that embrace modern cloud, AI, and ecosystem technologies pull away from the competition.

Accelerate your strategy and execution with Cloud Lighthouse

Crafting, executing, and making smart investments in a scalable cloud strategy can challenge even the most innovative organizations. Cloud Lighthouse helps IT and business leaders become strategic leaders for the Age of AI, to craft your Cloud + AI strategy, then execute and scale it across your organization. Partner with us.

✔ Build and execute your Cloud + AI strategy

✔ Adopt ecosystem-oriented architecture

✔ Firm, fixed costs for our work together

✔ Deep, executive-level expertise

✔ No consultants or development team to sell you

  • Inspiration and co-Design workshops jump start our Cloud and AI strategy as we build the executive vision, ecosystem-oriented architecture, and actionable roadmap for your cloud journey.

  • Collaboration with the CXO or other executive leader(s) builds their confidence and provides strategic guidance, understanding of technology trends, sets priorities, and keeps things moving.

  • Cloud Lighthouse builds and guides the internal team that executes the strategy and aligns action with vision, landing the tech in a way that grows the ecosystem and creates value for the organization.

  • Measure and demonstrate progress executing our roadmap, adjusting along the way to account for challenges, opportunities, and emerging technologies.

  • Nobody’s future proof, so we set aside time to be used however we need—on more complex unplanned activities coming out of our workshops, unknown variables that emerge, team coaching, issue resolution, and more.

Cloud Strategy

Untangling the web as we invest and build technology atop strategic foundations: Executive vision, high-impact workloads, and architecture for a modern cloud ecosystem that aligns technology investment with business outcomes 💡

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AI Strategy

Leading organizations into the “Age of AI” with a strategy built upon five pillars: Data Consolidation and Readiness, Incremental and Differential AI, and Scaling AI across the enterprise (and it’s people). We actually wrote the book on this 😉

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Ecosystem Architecture

Ecosystem-oriented architecture enables highly flexible, almost living and breathing cloud estates knit together across Azure, Fabric, Power Platform, M365, and third-party technologies. You cannot truly scale cloud or AI without it ⛰️

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Learn more from the Cloud Lighthouse blog

Featured
How Power Platform scales generative AI across an organization
How Power Platform scales generative AI across an organization

Power Platform scales AI and the data platform by providing a composable means of both data collection and delivery of insights and AI capability back to the user. Meanwhile, the great, often unsung capability of Power Platform is not the “app”, rather the ability (via Dataverse) of data transacted in a Power Platform solution to hydrate downstream data distribution scenarios such as analytical workloads, enterprise search, and—you guessed it—whatever AI infused workload you dream up. Let’s explore this.

RAG and the fundamentals of AI acting on enterprise data
RAG and the fundamentals of AI acting on enterprise data

CIOs and enterprise architects need not be experts in the technical mechanics of AI to formulate and execute an effective AI strategy. That said, it is critical that leaders driving their AI strategy understand this basic concept of how institutional AI—that is to say, AI workloads specific to your organization—both requires and acts on enterprise data. This approach is what we call “Retrieval Augmented Generation” or “RAG”, which you may have heard of. The name is quite literal: Here we are augmenting the generative pre-trained (and now you know what “GPT” stands for) model with data that we have retrieved from the organization’s data estate.

Building future-ready cloud ecosystems for the age of AI
Building future-ready cloud ecosystems for the age of AI

Discussing AI in recent months I have often thought about the fable of the boiled frog, whereby a frog placed in boiling water jumps out, but a frog placed in warm water that is gradually heated lacks awareness of his impending demise until it is too late. Or, as I continue to remind the CIOs with whom I work closely, the grace period for organizations to get their act together and position themselves for the next wave is growing much shorter, the margin for error much more narrow.

Understanding cloud ecosystem value and architecture via a “strategic pyramid”
Understanding cloud ecosystem value and architecture via a “strategic pyramid”

Let’s consider a model for how organizations should be prioritizing their work and investments in the Microsoft Cloud. The imperative here could not be greater. Technological advancements are now moving on timelines that in some instances can be measured in weeks. Not months. Not years. But weeks. This both accelerates and is accelerated by the shift to system-based value. In other words, getting the platform ecosystem right in an organization is both necessary to creating the greatest likelihood that the organization can absorb rapid innovation, whilst simultaneously creating the conditions that drive that rapid innovation forward. But too many organizations have misallocated their focus up and down the value chain, prioritizing workload implementation either at the expense of or out of ignorance to architecting strategic foundations, building the platform ecosystem, and creating the conditions for success. That’s a bit esoteric, so let’s visualize this phenomenon as the “strategic pyramid”…

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