There are several steps required to take up and follow before operating in a cloud environment. The prerequisites consists of different evaluations and scenarios before starting with the implementation.
The cloud adoption rates have different perceptions based on functions. The lowest estimates come from the business, followed by IT and the highest come from the top management. Awareness raising activities are necessary to achieve a common view.
The cloud adoption looks at factors which enable digital business success such as
- New IT and Business capabilities.
- Optimize business models and using IT capabilities.
- Enable cloud models by embracing cloud first or replace legacy systems with cloud services.
- Align cloud to the business strategy by embracing cloud best approach.
- Ramp up workloads to the cloud appropriately to meet both existing and new requirements.
Companies use the public cloud to enable digital business transformation and optimization. Digital business models enable and support new revenue streams and enhance existing practices through data analytics. Infrastructure and operations leaders can use the public cloud’s ability to improve cost optimization, agility and innovation as a foundation for their digital business initiatives. Cloud brings dynamic capabilities.
Companies want measurable outcomes from their digital transformation initiatives. They should look at
- Economy of scale – how can digital transformation support high volumes of transactions?
- Where can agility be adapted most effective?
- Which infrastructure can be easily automated?
- Which applications have the biggest impact to enable digital business?
The cloud is not at the first place. CIO’s focus on digital initiatives, business and revenue growth. The role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Analytics has precedence over the cloud.
Success Factors
Cloud adoption success factors cover the 3 different areas (business, IT, top management) mentioned above. What are these? The following listing should help.
- Create and manage the inventory of systems and applications to assess readiness for the cloud.
- Cloud vendor selection per cloud layer. Conduct cloud layer evaluation workshops with different vendors and concrete showcases to demonstrate for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.
- Build the required skills for IT and business team members to be part of the cloud team.
- As part of the vendor selection process, create different architecture scenarios for the private, public, hybrid and multi cloud solutions. An architecture based on open source helps you avoiding vendor lock-in in proprietary implementations.
- For each scenario create risk mitigations, security assessments, business continuity and exit scenarios to avoid vendor lock-ins.
- Ensure the scenarios meet legal and compliance requirements. Consider GDPR and location, external regulations an internal compliance.
- Estimate the costs and benefits based on future SLA’s with the vendors, define policies and procedures to have a governance in place.
- Before you order the first cloud services create scenarios with the vendors which cloud services are automated and how cloud workloads are managed. This is also a part of the SLA’s.
- Go through a future state when the cloud environments are in the operational mode. How are cloud deployments managed? How are the services consumed monitored and measured? This is also a part of the SLA’s with your vendors.
Cloud Service Providers Evaluation
Who are the top cloud service providers? Gartner’s 2020 magic quadrant shows the following ranking:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud
- Alibaba Cloud
- Oracle
- IBM Cloud
- Tencent Cloud
Other key players in the cloud world are:
- Salesforce
- SAP
- Rackspace Cloud
- VMWare
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
- Cisco
- Workday
- Adobe
Expecting Changes in use of Cloud Service Providers
Regarding cloud vendor selection criteria, the leading cloud SaaS vendors are expecting changes based on Flexera’s 2020 State of Tech Spend Report:
