Part 2: Evolutionary Stages of Cloud Adoption
In Part 1 I explained the key to cloud transformations being focused on business outcomes, the cloud journey enabling flexibility and accelerating business outcomes for organisation’s customers, operations and financials. I positioned that most companies pre-dating ‘born on the cloud’ have heavy intellectual, data and technology investment in conventional monolithic applications in data centres and on mainframes.?In Part 2, we explore what effect these challenges have on organisations adopting cloud and why they are at different evolutionary stages.
To maximise the value from cloud there are fundamental changes required in how your business and governance operates, as well as the skills required and the methodologies that you adopt need to be aligned to these changes. We have seen many examples of tens of millions spent on ERP systems, which appear to have failed, due to an inability to materially change business processes. This leads to highly customised ERP systems which are complex to develop, integrate and manage / change and deliver sub-optimal business outcomes. Similarly, cloud adoption needs to be planned from the basis of the digital transformation objectives and a recognition of the changes required within your organisation to optimise the benefits.
Entering the pandemic there were two competing architectures for cloud: a single-cloud architecture and a hybrid cloud architecture. Now, a clear winner has emerged with less than 3% of enterprises still aligned to a single hyperscaler and hybrid cloud being the clear path to achieve the best outcomes as the world moves to cloud-based businesses. There are 3 material states where companies are evolving from:
Firstly, there are those stating that they have moved to cloud:?over 30% of companies state that they have completed their cloud journey, however, unless they are a ‘born on the cloud enterprise’, most are operating sub-optimally. The majority have simply ‘lifted and shifted’ their applications, without considering the changes necessary to benefit from being ‘on the cloud’.?For many of our clients we are helping them to develop their application and platform strategy in line with their key business objectives. Whilst this may sound an obvious pre-requisite to moving to the cloud, some early movers to cloud are now finding it to be a more expensive TCO than prior to migrating workloads. Often, they moved due to a material commercial decision, for example, a data centre lease coming to an end or an outsourcing contract or a technology upgrade and decided to remove that legacy commercial lock-in. However, by making that commercial decision the business and applications strategy have been missed. ?Only now are they considering, the application rationalisation, containerisation, and refactoring required, to optimise the application and cloud environment, with several factors that are materially sub-optimal.
IBM addresses the optimisation of our client’s hybrid cloud estate by viewing this through multiple lenses:
·??????Cost optimisation: Track, measure and optimise cloud cost to allow smarter cost decisions through FinOps, KPI and tool-based approaches
·??????Performance optimisation: Response time and throughput analysis and improvement; capacity optimisation and management
·??????Sustainability enhancement: Waste reduction, informed by monitoring and analysis; consolidation, use of containers, leaner middleware, architectural elegance
·??????Operational resilience: Enabling operational excellence using an inference engine to analyse the relationship between critical business functions & supporting IT
·??????Cloud strategy & operational model: Cloud advisory experts defining, assessing and optimising a client’s cloud strategy and operational model
·??????Application modernisation & move: Multi KPI approach leading to appropriate modernisation and rationalisation benefits
·??????Platform / Management optimisation: Effective hybrid cloud use; next generation hybrid cloud service management; automation, AI Ops / Chat Ops and dashboards
·??????Security enhancement: Providing deep cyber-security expertise, from policy advice and enhancement to practical engineering.
IBM has a wealth of proven professional services and market-leading software platforms to support our clients through this optimisation.?Often, we find the initial optimisation lens which our clients need to address is cost optimisation, as often a ‘lift and shift’ to cloud has increased IT operational costs by between 1.2 and 1.7 times.?This saving can then be re-invested to optimise further areas. To enable this, IBM has made significant investment in the acquisition of market-leading cloud capabilities to leverage, including:
·??????Nordcloud (for Cloud Managed Services, including utilising the Klarity toolset for FinOps),
·??????Turbonomics and Instana (for Cost, Performance and Operational Resilience)
·??????RedHat OpenShift (for Containerisation and Platform Flexibility, enabling the movement of workloads across the hybrid cloud to maximise market conditions).
We utilised much of this capability in enabling a European city to accelerate their journey to Net Zero by 2025, optimising the use of renewables and balancing the grid to secure reliable and affordable energy supply:
An example: European City
领英推荐
Background
·??????City of 500,000+ inhabitants wanted to become a world leader in on-line services and energy consumption
?
Transformation Overview
·????Digital, “Public CloudFirst” transformation program, spanning both application and talent transformation, enhancing agility, flexibility & speed to market, to better serve citizens and business
·????Consolidated 30 data centres into 6 strategic data centres as a private cloud as part of their hybrid cloud, driving infrastructure savings
·????Modernised platform & application landscape, with 400 applications modernised and 20% retired, migrated to a hybrid cloud environment leveraging a Red Hat OpenShift platform with an API & Micro-services-based architecture.
?
Key Transformation Benefits
·????Upskilled & reskilled talent for the future, with 2000+ certifications & adoption of agile and DevSecOps methods
·????Materially reduced costs of operation funding further services to be made available / reassignment of budgets
·????Increased agility in new services with 50% reduction in ‘time to market’ for change / new services launched
·????Greater access and digitised capability for citizens, businesses and operational staff.
?
Secondly, 33% ?are stalled in their journey: many because the business case is not on track, others due to priority changes and others because they’ve recognised that a single cloud strategy was not the right strategy. Ensuring the strategy is right in the first place avoids the pit falls of struggling business cases. The evolution of enterprise cloud architecture underpins the benefits of a hybrid multi cloud approach, enabling application workloads to be deployed across a mix of On-Prem, Private and Public Clouds, all operating in an integrated model.?
Defining a foundational set of principles enable enterprises to shape how and where workloads are placed, and how cloud services are delivered, consumed, supported and managed across the value chain. Additionally, automation and AI / ML are critical to the successful transformation of the application engineering and service management capabilities across enterprises. Whilst the definition of the cloud strategy is essential, all technologies evolve, so it is essential to regularly assess cloud maturity, using objective measures to adapt and improve to drive maximum benefits.
The alignment between Business Transformation and Hybrid Cloud is paramount to this evolution and setting major enterprise applications and their data sets as cloud enabled. For example, SAP RISE enables the distribution of finance processing from on-prem / private cloud to run on different hyperscalers.?This migration is not just a technical transformation but requires extensive experience in finance business process orchestration and design. From the SaaS commercial model through to the data models employed, it enables a hybrid cloud environment across the multiple functions.?This type of solution aligned with IBM as a client’s System Integrator with hybrid cloud as IBM’s strategy and being the world’s leading S/4 implementation partner, is instrumental in facilitating stalled cloud strategies back on track utilising this approach as a hub.
The final third of enterprises: are those who have not yet moved and have been held back by regulators, contractual restrictions, have had other priorities or have been wanting to see how the market evolves. ?Whilst regulators in specific industries are somewhat cautious regarding full cloud adoption, the continuing improvements in public cloud security capabilities and the availability of dedicated private / public clouds, mean that the full move to cloud is on the horizon. With this in mind, many clients in regulated industries are focusing on the containerisation of existing on-prem workloads into an optimised private cloud as a staging post for a much simpler migration to public cloud once available.
?
In my next blog I will?position the strategies for data and security in Hybrid Cloud. For more information?on @IBM hybrid cloud business led transformation please go to: https://www.ibm.com/consulting/cloud