Key focus areas to accelerate and scale Hybrid-Multi-Cloud adoption!!

All organizations should have cloud-enabled business or IT transformations as a long-term objective. However, achieving the desired outcomes can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, taking up to 5-8 years. A successful cloud transformation requires careful planning, execution, and ongoing governance. Based on my recent experience, the following key areas require focus and attention for longer-term benefits:

Cloud Strategy and Benefit Case: While every organization has a Cloud strategy and benefits case, yearly optimization and validation are necessary to ensure alignment with hyperscalers' business and technology roadmaps. Clear communication is crucial to ensure everyone involved in the cloud transformation understands the goals, benefits, and expectations. This includes communicating the funding model and dependency on value release every 3-6 months.

Continuous Portfolio Prioritization, co-existence & transition state management: Continuously prioritizing cloud migration or modernization efforts based on business value, cost savings, and resiliency is key to success. Also, co-existence and transition state management for a multi-year complex Cloud journey are not easy. More often than not, there will be compromises to be made. There are businesses and IT initiatives run in parallel and continuous alignment will avoid duplication of capability, effective transition state management, and better risk and dependency management.

Regulatory notification: More often than not organisations are required to notify regulators of any material workload moving to the Cloud. This sometimes causes delays and changes in hosting strategy. It's important to engage with regulators and take necessary approvals obtained in advance.

Cloud Center of Excellence (CoE): In a product-centric operating model, application teams progressively require more autonomy. A Hub and Spoke model, where CCOE specialists are deployed in key Cloud projects across the business platforms, can accelerate Cloud adoption. A cloud CoE can establish cloud guidelines, policies, design, and architecture standards across applications, data, security, network, DevOps, and platformOps. It can also help with the adoption of new technology patterns or products and establish a cloud benefit realization process and governance.

Cloud Platform Services: In an enterprise environment, hyperscaler service catalogs require customization and enhancement before releasing to developers in Dev and test landing zones. Service provisioning (IaC) based on service requests in ServiceNow is also a challenge in a hybrid enterprise environment.

Cloud Landing Zone: A cloud landing zone with the right security, capacity, monitoring, and compliance using IaC scripts (ARM or Terraform) can help with consistent deployment and management of cloud resources. However, strict governance is necessary to monitor environmental usage.

DevOps Pipeline: Management of DevOps pipeline is becoming a big area of focus in all enterprises as the number of pipelines continues to grow. Organizations often set up 3-4 types of pipelines (infra pipeline, CI pipeline, and CD Pipeline), and a similar set of pipelines is developed for Data and AI applications and workloads.

Security and Compliance: Management of identity and access with RBAC can become tricky with multiple tenants across on-prem and Cloud. PIM is hardly used as a preferred way of giving access. Cloud security and posture management tools (CSPM) can enable policy-driven regulatory compliance checks of the landing zones. Robust security design standards across application, data, network, storage, API, container, and DB, and installing and setting up IAM, CSPM, SIEM, SOAR tools can help ensure the right levels of security and compliance.

PlatformOps and Service Management: Robust logging and monitoring framework (across VM, application DB, network, etc.), followed by automated alerting and incident management (integration with ServiceNow or other ITSM tools) can significantly help reduce outages. L1, L2 incident runbook automation & triaging can help improve reliability and reduce mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR).

TCO & Finance Management: Understanding the TCO for all applications in a Capex environment where resources are shared across platforms and applications can be notoriously difficult. Setting up TCO models with the right cost allocation across run and change services can help manage cloud costs effectively and ensure that business units are accountable for their cloud spend.

In summary, a successful cloud transformation requires a well-defined program shaping and benefits case, a clear operating model, a cloud CoE, cloud platform services, a cloud landing zone, DevOps and testing, security, platform ops and service management, and finance. With the right approach, organizations can realize significant benefits such as cost-saving, change efficiency, IT agility, security, faster time-to-business value, and resiliency.