 "So, You've Decided To Move To Cloud: What Next?")
Moving one step ahead of the ‘cloud vs. no cloud’ debate, finally you decide to go ahead. What follows is the next level of discussion, or rather action. And, that is where the all important ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘how’ questions come into the picture.
For many an enterprise the struggle starts here. These are not easy questions to answer considering the ground realities and challenges that need to be dealt with. Cloud really is not about transferring all your responsibilities to someone else, as the popular perception goes. Scott Cassin, Chief Technologist and Strategist for Enterprise Services in HP Asia Pacific and Japan offers some handy tips to CIOs moving on to cloud or planning to do so.
Get Your Timing Right
So, as you take the next step the first question that needs answering is: when is it well suited to move to the cloud and makes better business sense. From the perspective of an existing enterprise, Scott suggests that as it starts something new, a new project or business, it should consider going the cloud way. This is an extremely strong opportunity for cloud.
Cloud can be an opportunity for many new businesses and start-ups too. He strongly advises that they should not be thinking about having fixed IT assets on their books, and cloud should be the pre-dominant solution they look for. However, to clarify, this does not mean disregarding any other timing for cloud implementation, but rather is one of the options that can help leverage cloud more optimally.
In fact, in India we have seen that when enterprises, especially in manufacturing, want to introduce mobility as a service to their dealers they go to the cloud. It helps them launch their services quicker in the marketplace, thereby gaining competitive edge.
Scott has a reason to back up his theory of new business and projects being more opportune: unlike major enterprises and existing businesses they don’t have a whole lot of transformation that needs to happen. In other words, they don’t have the legacy and a whole lot of change management to deal with. “That doesn’t mean that you can’t deal with the legacy. But, it’s going to be a higher cost of entry because you have to re-engineer the legacy environment in order to take advantage of some cloud architectures,” he is quick to add.
Value Proposition: Avoid Disappointment
The value proposition that cloud has to offer is not a factor to left to be dealt with towards the fag end of the project, when measuring impact. Setting right expectations around the value proposition at the onset can go a long way in avoiding disappointment at a later stage. You are expecting miracles with cloud but when you are measuring impact you may find none. And, that’s not because there has been no impact, rather you are looking in the wrong place for it.
It’s advisable for CIOs to get realistic with the outcome they are looking for. To begin with unrealistic expectations will only mean wrong choice of cloud architecture for the wrong reasons, spelling doom for the project. For instance, if the expectation is to bring down the price point per gigabyte of storage and realise value at the infrastructure asset level, then a private cloud would be an absolutely wrong choice, and instead public cloud or VPC should be the choice. But, if you are not too stuck up on savings from not locking the IT assets and want to look at the value realised through the business benefit of speed to provision, deploy, operate and scale services, then private cloud would be a better bet.
But Are You Even Accessing That Value?
Having understood the value proposition, the next step for the CIO is the strategy to access that value. According to Scott, by now CIOs very well understand the value that cloud offers, but the challenge now is how to get there. This is where things get complex. To put it simply, it means answering questions like: What is the right strategy to deploy; what are the right sets of frameworks; when would be the right time to migrate what services on to different delivery architectures; where is it completely valid to retain them on the existing platforms; what is the strategic and differentiating information that you might want to retain that on-premise today; what are those services and assets that have no IP or differentiation, such as basic web tier, and can be hosted from a public cloud? And, then continuing to review it over time.
Integration Complexities: Not As Simple As You Thought
The real test comes when it is time to move beyond the discussions and getting hands dirty on ground, which is where the frustration and complexity for many enterprises lies. According to Scott, this is an area that CIOs tend to overlook.
Certain business services can be migrated in whole while others can be migrated only in parts to the different cloud architectures, creating integration complexities. And, where you have integration with complexity, you introduce risk: information privacy risk, security risk and operational risk.
That’s where things can go wrong and enterprises just retract back to not doing anything at all, which is not the right way to approach it. The right approach would be to recognise that different architectures need to be there.
Complexities also extend to integrating cloud implementations from different service providers. Each individual service provider has to look into the security of its respective cloud implementation, which makes it secure. But, the problem is that one may not be dealing with a single service provider, but rather an integrated end-to-end process.
Therefore, the challenge is around having the security and management layer covered end-to-end. It has to cover all the individual providers underneath it, so that the business actually gets that risk and compliance capability and satisfaction, says Scott. “We still haven’t solved as an industry many of the integration and, therefore, potential data and privacy issues that might be in a multi-vendor, multi-integrated cloud environment,” he adds.
In some respects, it all boils down to the complexity of integration where CIOs go wrong in deriving value out of their cloud implementations.
Having all the above sorted is no guarantee for success of your cloud project unless you are adopting cloud for the right reasons. Otherwise it will not only be an unnecessary cost spiral but also a security nightmare. If businesses start to consume cloud for many different areas too aggressively they run the risk of not having risk and compliance around how they manage those information assets.