Unleashing the true value of Cloud

It's been few months since I contributed to the 4-part series I started a while back starting with selecting the right cloud for the right workloads, to making sense of public, private and hybrid cloud and looking at top 5 challenges in the cloud.

During this article, I want to focus on unleashing true value from the cloud, how do you achieve real business value from the cloud? How is cloud enabling a wider transformation not only in the business world but to our daily lives? from, the services we all consume as citizens to achieve the outcomes we need in our daily lives, paying for goods, to interacting with the public services.

Achieving real business value

To achieve real business, value the business vision and the strategy need to be aligned with the use of Cloud. Cloud should be utilised as a vehicle to take the business to next level and achieve its goals, not the other way around it needs to be a business first rather than cloud first policy where you are starting with the business vision and goals.

How do business outcomes interact with technology? This happens through the applications lens; business processes are underpinned by application and software. The application stack is underpinned by various layers of (O/S, Middleware/DB/Messaging) and finally the physical infrastructure.

Moving to the cloud has some major implications on how an organisation builds and consumes the software or applications which underpin the business processes, for example, reducing the support and administrative burden of the physical layer to transforming how they finance the cost of consuming technology i.e. CAPEX to OPEX.

Cloud provides on-demand pricing, flexibility, and scale to help the business lower costs and enable technology teams to move faster and thus speeding up business ability to launch new innovations and indeed create new verticals. This is where cloud provides real value by allowing CIO's to pursue innovation and direct attention to business change rather than focusing on running applications or the wider IT architecture.

Moving to cloud provides some instance savings for example space, power and hosting costs all relative to the source and target model as well as type of application being migrated but the real value is unlocked when the end customer is liberated, I use the word liberated because that's exactly what it is in sense that the customer is free to innovate, control and can transform the workload according to the user needs.

Transformation in the cloud

Just moving into the cloud will not deliver true business value promised by the cloud, don't get me wrong it will give you instance cost savings in terms of hosting, power, and some support costs but will not enable you to achieve the sort of innovation and digital transformation you had in mind.

People, Process, and Technology

Each one of these needs to be considered for example developing your applications in a traditional on-premise style where you have a highly stateful stack of applications can result in increased maintenance costs as well as significant technical and architectural debt by being hosted in the cloud. Appropriate change needs to be established in the process area also otherwise this will also undermine the transformation in the cloud, in fact, the areas of people and process are where the majority of large-scale transformation projects fail.

You must optimise and design your applications for cloud (Cloud-native) to attain real business value from the cloud. A cloud-native design will allow you to take advantage of scale and resiliency in the cloud as well as the elasticity that can be achieved when running applications in the cloud.

DevOps and Automation

Some will say DevOps and Automation are broadly the same concepts, I would say DevOps is more than just automation, automation is something of an output of DevOps. DevOps in my opinion much more than a bunch of CI tooling it is a culture made up of practices and tools which enable an organisation's ability to deliver application and services at a faster pace using software development and infrastructure management processes.

DevOps has been embraced by many startups and is closely associated with cloud and for good reason, cloud is the foundation, the platform for new innovation and new ways of doing things i.e. DevOps there are others, for example, IOT, Data analytics (Big Data) AI all these concepts and development are built on top of the cloud.

When we look at transformation in the cloud, DevOps needs to be a core part of the strategy, for example, moving from monolithic applications architectures to micro-services architecture enabling a decoupled application architecture which can be independently operated and updated.

This then allows for more frequent releases allowing for delivery of incremental and rapid improvements all contributing to creating value by allowing for faster developments and thus release of products and services.

Cloud-Native vs Enterprise

Education and awareness of the enterprise vs cloud-native needs to be tackled to take true value from the cloud, otherwise, you could well be paying the price for running incompatible architectures in the cloud, one size fits all is not an approach I would advocate.

Enterprise workloads are legacy, monolithic applications which scale vertically and rely heavily on stateful attributes, they have a huge dependency on the underlying physical architecture to provide the non-functional requirements for example resiliency and availability.

Cloud-native applications are designed using the 12factor methodology https://12factor.net where applications are stateless and are 'microservices' architecture providing decoupled application opposite of the monolithic design of enterprise this allows for horizontal scaling to be applied which is one of the key characteristics of cloud.

Facing up to the challenges

In one of my previous articles, I discuss some of the challenges around cloud, to gain true value from cloud these need to be considered and appropriate plans in mitigating the risks need to be prepared.

There have been few high-profile issues around resiliency in the cloud and more work needs to be done in educating and training people on the difference and designing architectures in the cloud as well as a plan B strategy.

The other aspect that's been playing on my mind is the political situation in the world right now, it is making organisations think about the possible implications of a sudden change in policy or international trade agreement. Organisations need to have sound contingency plans in the likely scenario of changing political as well as legal landscape.