Pragmatic Multicloud for Defense

In defense, we talk about information superiority: ?getting better information to decision-makers faster and enabling them to act faster, and the cloud is designed to achieve exactly that.

Unfortunately, benefits require effort: we must first transform our organization and applications to take full advantage of the cloud. Multi-cloud brings greater control, functionality, and geographic availability, but also complexity and risk. Hence it accelerates cloud’s advantages and the need for modernization.

How to achieve information superiority?

Information superiority demands continual improvement in how we gather, analyze, share and act on information; thus, we need detailed performance metrics, the ability to change easily and to roll back underperforming changes.

This is by no means specific to defense: every organization globally faces the same challenges. If we look at LinkedIn, X or the blogosphere, we see endless solutions: technologists advocate Kubernetes and DataMesh; methodologists discussing agile and scrum; security consultants selling Zero Trust and Data Centric Security, and everyone discussing GenAI. However, the question cannot be “what is fashionable?”; it is “how do we help our users do their jobs better, cheaper and faster?”

In our experience this relies on five pillars:

These pillars rely on the free flow of information, enabling better and more informed decision making whatever the location (battlefield, back-office, or the R&D, manufacturing and logistic chains). This demands high quality of service (low risk, high resilience, high security, cost effective) and rapid evolution based on actionable insight into end user needs and analysis of previous release performance.

Success lies in making thoughtful choices tailored to unique end user’s needs, not in pursuing a one-size-fits-all approach. When we discuss multi-cloud, we must avoid a focus on the technology and fashion aspects and again ask: “how does multi-cloud help our users do their jobs better, cheaper and faster?"

But can the cloud deliver all this for all applications? No, only applications that have been modernized to take full advantage. Any application running in the cloud following a simple lift and shift migration is unlikely to realize the full benefits; it may even be slower, less resilient and more expensive than it was before! That’s why we need to talk about pragmatic cloud migrations before we can talk about pragmatic multi-cloud.

Pragmatic cloud migrations are driven by effective organizational operating models, enterprise architecture and especially application portfolio management. They balance the need to modernize against the time, cost, risk and business impact of modernization. Pragmatic migrations also maintain the focus on using the cloud to help get better information to decision makers faster, cheaper and better, rather than seeing a cloud migration as the endgame itself.

High business value applications with extended service lives should be invested in; unique applications becoming cloud native through rearchitecting, and commodity applications repurchased as SaaS. The lower value applications may be refactored and targeted for eventual sunsetting.

As cloud migrations progress, we should see a reduction in undifferentiated heavy lifting, as applications increasingly consume the cloud provider’s managed services, rather than “rolling their own”. A landing zone has many services, not least:

These managed services are often provided as part of a landing-zones, allowing consuming applications to immediately build on the cloud. Following the patterns developed in partnership between enterprise architecture and the cloud providers helps ensure applications adhere to the faster, cheaper, better philosophy. A continual service improvement loop then ensures the reference patterns continue to adapt to application needs and the latest best practices developed by the cloud provider.

Many organizations start with a single cloud provider as it is a great way to start a cloud journey: it is simple, cost effective, and provides many services. However, as adoption grows, concerns emerge: the degree of lock-in to a single provider, the risk an incident impacts all applications, the coverage of that provider in all geographies, and demand for access to unique services offered by other providers.

As the need for multi-cloud grows, we need pragmatic solutions to hard choices. We suggest:

Some of these decisions are highly emotive. For example, there are strong arguments:

These decisions cannot be made in isolation. They must be informed by the five pillars of cloud transformation, and they must be made to make end users more effective.

Pragmatic multi-cloud results in multiple regions and providers, each with relatively independent landing zones brought together with common Integration and Federation Services:

Neither cloud nor multi-cloud will ever be a magic bullet. [Spoiler: neither will AI]. We have many technical and organizational challenges to overcome before we unlock better, cheaper and faster.? Hence, we must ask how to make this successful?

What we need to make this successful?

To make a multi-cloud journey successful, we must address the five pillars previously introduced (Organizational & Operating Model, Enterprise Architecture, APM, landing zones and continual improvement) in parallel – coincidentally the same five pillars we must unlock for digital transformation and information superiority.

These pillars are a great start for cloud journeys, but there are more topics than can be considered in a single article; not least how AI can be leveraged; how zero trust and sovereign / classified cloud can address the unique security requirements of the defense industry; how cloud deployments differ for multi-nationals; and how data centric security, open collaboration and integration standards glue together human to human and computer to computer collaboration.

Closing thoughts

There are many challenges for defense companies adopting digital practices and cloud migrations. Some are unique to defense; others common to across our increasingly complex and connected world.

Capgemini has many years’ global experience addressing these challenges pragmatically and looks forward to doing so for many years to come.