Adopting a Hybrid Cloud Approach: Part I - Business Led Transformation
The pace of business change continues to increase, even going into a recession. The ability to react, whether it’s a pandemic, geo-political uncertainty or economic head winds are driving our clients to evolve rapidly through Digital Transformation. This has driven consumer expectation and client execution to a pace never witnessed before. We now face a period with a high number of market challenges including high inflation, high interest rates, potential multi-region recession, skills shortages, ongoing sanctions, supply chain disruption, plus government instability. Since the pandemic, IT is now the core of many company’s operations, it has been a realisation of global operations without physical presence, virtual customer interaction being the norm, across all industries and whether B2B or B2C interaction. The acceleration of digital transformation has also led many companies to insource elements of IT to build capability to define their own destiny. Multiple generations of IT outsourcing have reduced IT costs but also reduced the internal capability to innovate. Greater digital adoption is inevitable through the consumer and enterprise markets with the need for business to continually flex, reduce costs and upskill workforces. This requires ongoing rapid change with a focus on Artificial Intelligence, automation, and Hybrid Cloud, these forming the basis of IBM 's strategy.
In this 3 part blog I:
-???????Explain how companies have gained material business benefit from adopting a hybrid cloud approach through a business led transformation
-???????Position the stages of cloud adoption and the approach to success from each of them
-???????Develop potential approaches to resolve data and security integration challenges.
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Part 1: Business Led Transformation
Companies need strong innovation built on a collaborative ecosystem. In both IBM’s Technology and Consulting business, this ecosystem has materially evolved, through our acquisitions and our partners.?Through the thousands of client transformations completed, IBM has proven we enable our clients: from advising them on their digital transformation, through to delivering their dynamic IT journey and continuing to evolve and run their transformation.
Our client’s cloud transformations are focused on key business outcomes. Cloud is a multi-year journey and not a one stop destination. Plans need to include Applications, Infrastructure, Data, and an Operating Model in order to maximise the benefits of cloud economics to the business. Just moving to public cloud does not deliver business benefit and can increase costs. There are many examples where clients have migrated to cloud for short-term commercial or technology reasons and now face greater challenges. Our client’s cloud journey must enable flexibility and accelerate business outcomes for their customers, operations and financials. Most company’s pre-dating ‘born on the cloud’ have heavy intellectual, data and technology investment in conventional monolithic applications in data centres and on mainframes. Many have wrapped public cloud around the legacy to look “agile”. This grows the complexity of operational resilience and understanding where data is at any one time. The growth of software as a service (SaaS) application, plus applications and data running at the edge coupled with potentially multiple clouds (private and public), is increasing the security exposure whilst often not having the security operating model to cope.
An example: Global Consumer Products Company
Background
·????Global footprint in 180 countries
Transformation Overview
·????‘Public cloud first’ strategy with a data centre exit in 24 months to reduce technical debt: improving agility, reducing fixed cost, increasing compliance, resilience and security whilst liberating previous software licence regime by moving to Open Source
·????Transform 280+ applications, including global and local applications to enable cloud migration and develop an API-driven enterprise to ensure ongoing agility.
Key Transformation Benefits
·????‘30 apps in 30 days’ migration velocity delivered to ensure rapid delivery of benefits
·????Significant increase in use of DevOps to enable end to end delivery assurance and assured rapid and low-cost future change
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·????Material license cost reductions through the migration to cloud with refactoring of application, rather than lift and shift
·????Sales Journey time reduced from 1 hour to 15 mins , improving efficiency of sales force and material business operational cost reduction.
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Legacy architecture, application and business logic demand the need for hybrid cloud where environments are split in the public cloud and on-premise / hosted. Unfortunately, legacy applications, architecture, licensing and business logic make the migration to public cloud more complex and the need for hybrid environments the route forward to cloud. The key is to make this complexity seamless to the business user. A hybrid cloud platform integrates applications that run across multiple clouds, moving data securely across the cloud estate, improving business processes and workflows that span multiple clouds. It simplifies and integrates diverse elements of a large cloud estate, plus legacy infrastructure (due to regulatory requirements) into a single, coherent fabric of capabilities. This was the challenge for the client below:
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An example: Large global transportation client
Background
·????Operating to over 50+ countries.
Transformation Overview
·????End-to-end, digital transformation partnership, spanning application & talent transformation, increasing agility, speed to market & innovation
·????Modernisation, containerisation, & migration of 680 applications to a hybrid cloud environment.
Key Transformation Benefits
·????Enablement of the modernisation of on the ground and digital passenger experience, helping the client emerge with a stronger brand affinity & customer satisfaction
·????Reskilled, upskilled & transformed talent (2500 employees); 25% increase in employee satisfaction, improving employee and customer experience
·????Modernised, agile, resilient business with 70% reduction in time to market for new offers and for new operational processes to be introduced, leading to reduced cost and increased revenues directly from the programme alongside improved end to end IT performance and enhanced security & compliance.
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In my next blog I will?position the stages of cloud adoption and the approach to success from each of them. For more information?on IBM hybrid cloud business led transformation please go to: https://www.ibm.com/consulting/cloud
Couldn’t agree more Matt Wybrow and a focus on business outcomes alongside an opmodel change to be able realise them is essential to truly maximise the potential and value cloud offers
Senior Marketing Leader for Global Tech and Consulting brand leading in AI and Hybrid Cloud
2 年What a great read Matt Wybrow.
Technology Marketeer | Field Marketing | Campaign Management | Strategy & Planning | Data Driven
2 年Thank you for sharing and a great read - looking forward to part 2!
Managing Strategy Consultant at IBM
2 年Thank you for the interesting read, Matt! I completely agree that a focus on individual client’s key business outcomes is fundamental. For me, identifying the core problems that need to be solved should be the driver of any strategy, particularly one as significant as cloud adoption. Getting the drivers right will help to prevent ‘cloud for cloud’s sake,’ which as you mentioned can come with increased costs that don’t provide business benefit. Identifying and working the right problems (business-led rather than solution-led) will facilitate agility, reduce cost, and can result in innovative solutions and benefits that may not have been originally identified. There’s so much value to be had from adopting cloud; the fun part is helping our clients find it!
AWS Partner Technology Leader APJ, Retail/CPG
2 年Insightful content Matt Wybrow thanks a lot for sharing. Personally I found the case study of the global consumer company interesting. One penny from myside, if I may - long term benefits come with a trade-off of short term fear, uncertainty and doubts. In my view, it will be helpful to know about some of the key challenges faced and managed. Regards.