Cloud Adoption Lifecycle As a Game Changer
Many organisations are planning to adopt the cloud platform for umpteen reasons- to achieve scalability, cost-effectiveness, dynamic and well-synchronised organisational structure and much more. However the fact cannot be ignored that technologies evolve swiftly and one needs to be cautious before moving ahead of the curve. Gartner's report- 'Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies' places Cloud Computing at the 'Peak of Inflated Expectations' phase (a phase that represents over-enthusiastic and unrealistic expectations from a technology). Cloud Computing is known to be in this phase since last three years. According to Gartner's report, the next phase is the 'Trough of Disillusionment' (When a technology fails to meet expectations).
Organizations should make all efforts to avoid falling into this trough by carefully understanding and choosing correct aspects of Cloud Computing. Hence a systematic approach should be followed to ensure that the organizations move in the right direction right from the first step towards adopting the cloud platform.
The Cloud adoption lifecycle involves the following stages:
1) Anticipate
2) Measure
3) Plan
4) Test
5) Establish
6) Strengthen
All these stages are explained in the following subsequent sections:
1) Anticipate
An organization should be able to able to understand the importance and need for a flexible and elastic response from IT systems as the organization grows. The organization should know if the applications and the underlying infrastructure are scalable and reliable enough to take on constantly increasing workloads and should have the ability to absorb the spikes as well as agility to quick deployment.
To address these aspects the organization should map the challenges that could pose in the future. Some of the most unavoidable aspects count for:
- Does the present delivery structure qualify to deploy IT Services at the required speed?
- Are the daily IT operations consuming extra time and diverting the team's focus from other more important activities?
- Is the organization able to tap the 100% potential of IT?
- Are IT assets and HR assets fully utilized?
Contemplating on the above posed questions can help formulate the vision for IT which can enable business to grow rapidly. The organization must anticipate the prospective challenges and growing needs for the IT functions which can support the organization's growth. Apart from discovering the challenges the organization, must at the same time, look out for exploring the potential methods to address the challenges and realize their growth envision.
Anticipation should not be restricted to mere challenge analysing or realizing growth indicators, rather having a discreet and serious assessment of cloud's current maturity and adoption level across industries can raise its potential value from the standard to spectacular.
2) Measure
Once the Anticipate Stage results affirmative, this stage propels the organization towards the following steps:
- Understand in detail the technicalities of the cloud such as types of Clouds, what are the available cloud services, what can be the best suitable could for your organization, most reliable cloud services providers etc. Gaining knowledge for the delivery models and architecture models is crucial to understand answers to all the discussed questions. A thorough assessment into the organization's current IT activities is also necessary before migrating to the cloud (Assessment here counts for Technical and Financial assessment).
Technical Assessment:
An exhaustive technical-readiness assessment of the entire IT landscape should be conducted to evaluate the readiness of the organization. Following are some of the determining elements for Technical Assessment Process.
Infrastructure: Higher the percentage of virtualized environment (infrastructure & application), the readier it is to be migrated to the cloud.
Process: More complex the governance processes for deploying services and applications, change requests, regulating policies for backup and archival, auditing, monitoring, managing and agreement of SLAs, greater is the need to migrate to cloud space.
Financial Assessment:
To get the nod from the decision-makers, it is imperative to conduct a comparative study of the finances ('now' expenses and 'To-Be' expenses), this should include both direct (hardware, software) and indirect costs (energy consumption, carbon footprint), Tangible (quicker deployment of services) and intangible (client satisfaction, customer advocacy) incurred in running the business environment should be considered.
3) Plan
This is a crucial stage in which the final decision of moving towards the cloud platform is made. The key questions to be kept in mind before architecting a strategy for cloud selection and adoption are as follows:
- With huge investments already made in the database creation, hardware, software licenses and upgrades and etc., is it wise to migrate organization's applications to a cloud vendor OR is it advisable to have an internal private cloud?
- What are the applications best suited to be migrated and are there any risks associated with migrating them?
- Instead of utilizing in-house resources, will it be more expedient to hook up with a cloud vendor? Or would the freedom of shifting to other cloud vendor be still open in case of unsatisfactory services?
- Will business or IT teams be convinced and comfortable for the changes?
Answers to above questions may vary across organizations. In case of a start-up organization (which may lack sound financial strength to set up a dedicated IT environment to run its business) it is prudent to start operations on a cloud and consult the vendor to build cloud skills over a period of time.
A large organization (spread across the globe with a complex organization hierarchy) may not wish to swear by the cloud, due to fear of security breaches. On the other hand, it may look out for leveraging a private cloud to have a secured cloud environment.
4) Test
This stage involves migrating applications to the cloud. Applications should check box following checks in this stage:
- Capability to run in virtual environments (applications whose code depends on the hardware might require recoding to fit into the virtual environments)
- Redevelopment of highly customized applications to make them compatible to software supported by the cloud (Software as a Service)
- Re-porting (hardware portability) to a cloud compatible infrastructure (IaaS)
- Testing the application before migrating it to the cloud
Once the application goes live in the cloud space, business and IT users should provide a feedback on the response of the applications. The useful feedback should be incorporated to avoid hiccups in the smooth process of cloud usage. Later, organizations can stabilize the cloud operations and monitor the performance of the cloud over a period of few weeks.
5) Establish
This stage ensures smooth functioning and optimum utilisation of the cloud space. To strengthen the cloud culture in the organization, training sessions may be conducted for the end users which can help them yield extra benefits from the cloud.
Depending on the kind of cloud service delivery model adopted, the roles and responsibilities for running the cloud should be clearly defined between the consumer and the provider of the cloud.
6) Strengthen
This stage is an on-going process to continuously improve, strengthen and sustain the established organizational cloud space. This should be done through meeting and improving SLA agreements, open avenues and availability to business and restructuring the cloud at a defined period of time.
To improvise upon the cloud performance, a benchmarking assessment should be done to assess the overall cloud performance. The performance can be indicated by certain parameters like Service Level Agreements, key performance indicators, maturity level of cloud services offered based on the industry benchmarks, comparative studies on current cloud offerings across the organization as per the industry norms, unit cost incurred on providing cloud services.
Organizations should make all efforts to avoid falling into this trough by carefully understanding and choosing correct aspects of Cloud Computing. Hence a systematic approach should be followed to ensure that the organizations move in the right direction right from the first step towards adopting the cloud platform.
The Cloud adoption lifecycle involves the following stages:
1) Anticipate
2) Measure
3) Plan
4) Test
5) Establish
6) Strengthen
All these stages are explained in the following subsequent sections:
1) Anticipate
An organization should be able to able to understand the importance and need for a flexible and elastic response from IT systems as the organization grows. The organization should know if the applications and the underlying infrastructure are scalable and reliable enough to take on constantly increasing workloads and should have the ability to absorb the spikes as well as agility to quick deployment.
To address these aspects the organization should map the challenges that could pose in the future. Some of the most unavoidable aspects count for:
- Does the present delivery structure qualify to deploy IT Services at the required speed?
- Are the daily IT operations consuming extra time and diverting the team's focus from other more important activities?
- Is the organization able to tap the 100% potential of IT?
- Are IT assets and HR assets fully utilized?
Contemplating on the above posed questions can help formulate the vision for IT which can enable business to grow rapidly. The organization must anticipate the prospective challenges and growing needs for the IT functions which can support the organization's growth. Apart from discovering the challenges the organization, must at the same time, look out for exploring the potential methods to address the challenges and realize their growth envision.
Anticipation should not be restricted to mere challenge analysing or realizing growth indicators, rather having a discreet and serious assessment of cloud's current maturity and adoption level across industries can raise its potential value from the standard to spectacular.
2) Measure
Once the Anticipate Stage results affirmative, this stage propels the organization towards the following steps:
- Understand in detail the technicalities of the cloud such as types of Clouds, what are the available cloud services, what can be the best suitable could for your organization, most reliable cloud services providers etc. Gaining knowledge for the delivery models and architecture models is crucial to understand answers to all the discussed questions. A thorough assessment into the organization's current IT activities is also necessary before migrating to the cloud (Assessment here counts for Technical and Financial assessment).
Technical Assessment:
An exhaustive technical-readiness assessment of the entire IT landscape should be conducted to evaluate the readiness of the organization. Following are some of the determining elements for Technical Assessment Process.
Infrastructure: Higher the percentage of virtualized environment (infrastructure & application), the readier it is to be migrated to the cloud.
Process: More complex the governance processes for deploying services and applications, change requests, regulating policies for backup and archival, auditing, monitoring, managing and agreement of SLAs, greater is the need to migrate to cloud space.
Financial Assessment:
To get the nod from the decision-makers, it is imperative to conduct a comparative study of the finances ('now' expenses and 'To-Be' expenses), this should include both direct (hardware, software) and indirect costs (energy consumption, carbon footprint), Tangible (quicker deployment of services) and intangible (client satisfaction, customer advocacy) incurred in running the business environment should be considered.
3) Plan
This is a crucial stage in which the final decision of moving towards the cloud platform is made. The key questions to be kept in mind before architecting a strategy for cloud selection and adoption are as follows:
- With huge investments already made in the database creation, hardware, software licenses and upgrades and etc., is it wise to migrate organization's applications to a cloud vendor OR is it advisable to have an internal private cloud?
- What are the applications best suited to be migrated and are there any risks associated with migrating them?
- Instead of utilizing in-house resources, will it be more expedient to hook up with a cloud vendor? Or would the freedom of shifting to other cloud vendor be still open in case of unsatisfactory services?
- Will business or IT teams be convinced and comfortable for the changes?
Answers to above questions may vary across organizations. In case of a start-up organization (which may lack sound financial strength to set up a dedicated IT environment to run its business) it is prudent to start operations on a cloud and consult the vendor to build cloud skills over a period of time.
A large organization (spread across the globe with a complex organization hierarchy) may not wish to swear by the cloud, due to fear of security breaches. On the other hand, it may look out for leveraging a private cloud to have a secured cloud environment.
4) Test
This stage involves migrating applications to the cloud. Applications should check box following checks in this stage:
- Capability to run in virtual environments (applications whose code depends on the hardware might require recoding to fit into the virtual environments)
- Redevelopment of highly customized applications to make them compatible to software supported by the cloud (Software as a Service)
- Re-porting (hardware portability) to a cloud compatible infrastructure (IaaS)
- Testing the application before migrating it to the cloud
Once the application goes live in the cloud space, business and IT users should provide a feedback on the response of the applications. The useful feedback should be incorporated to avoid hiccups in the smooth process of cloud usage. Later, organizations can stabilize the cloud operations and monitor the performance of the cloud over a period of few weeks.
5) Establish
This stage ensures smooth functioning and optimum utilisation of the cloud space. To strengthen the cloud culture in the organization, training sessions may be conducted for the end users which can help them yield extra benefits from the cloud.
Depending on the kind of cloud service delivery model adopted, the roles and responsibilities for running the cloud should be clearly defined between the consumer and the provider of the cloud.
6) Strengthen
This stage is an on-going process to continuously improve, strengthen and sustain the established organizational cloud space. This should be done through meeting and improving SLA agreements, open avenues and availability to business and restructuring the cloud at a defined period of time.
To improvise upon the cloud performance, a benchmarking assessment should be done to assess the overall cloud performance. The performance can be indicated by certain parameters like Service Level Agreements, key performance indicators, maturity level of cloud services offered based on the industry benchmarks, comparative studies on current cloud offerings across the organization as per the industry norms, unit cost incurred on providing cloud services.
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