Global enterprises clearly understand that migrating to the cloud can accelerate their business transformation and rejuvenate their growth trajectory. The global cloud-computing market is expected to grow to $832.1 billion by 2025, a CAGR of 17.5% from 2020, with Gartner estimating by that time 85% of large enterprises will have adopted a cloud-first principle. As businesses pursue multi-cloud strategies to mitigate risks, they’re discovering management complexities due to operational silos and a lack of coordination among different units. This leaves enterprises unable to unlock the full value of their cloud-first strategy. To succeed, businesses must address one major component: designing an optimal model to manage cloud operations.
Three Design Principles for Optimal Cloud Operations
It is imperative for enterprises to design the right cloud operations to provision, configure, secure, monitor, and manage applications with predictable costs and improved service resilience. Companies should consider three design principles for a successful cloud adoption.
A good cloud-management platform should manage multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, providing a complete view of operations to deliver end-to-end operational insights.
Intelligent automation can help companies stay competitive by eliminating manual efforts for provisioning, deployments, access management, and monitoring. A software-defined model with Everything as Code (XaC) principles – Infra as Code, Configuration as Code, and Policy as Code – can enable dynamic rightsizing, plus auto scale-in and scale-out of the cloud services. Pipeline automation should use CI/CD/CT tools to enable continuous releases, while an AIOps solution for integrated monitoring from compute nodes to business processes, event correlation, and auto-remediation can provide self-healing capabilities.
Finally, cloud-native design can empower companies to exploit the advantages of cloud. A cloud-native design should include containerization and container orchestration for simplified DevOps, ease of application management, and auto-scaling, and it should also provide cloud portability. Adopting Microservices architecture patterns will enable teams to build scalable, resilient cloud-native applications.
Cloud Ops Improves Business Operations
An efficient cloud ops model can help organizations achieve cost savings and improve business operations. Wipro’s application-management services help organizations realize these benefits using a high-performance cloud ops model designed for agility and resiliency. Achieving maximum gains from the cloud, however, requires human considerations in addition to technical ones.
Wipro’s product-based operating model includes vertically integrated full-stack teams operating in an agile DevSecOps mode and focused on delivering agile metrics. The teams need to be reorganized by business value streams for greater business alignment and product ownership.
Smart operations are fueled by a digital command center that handles 60% - 70% of the service operation tasks. It accomplishes this through continuous automation of routine and repetitive activities, user requests, proactive monitoring, operational insights, and performance metrics.
Finally, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) with both engineering and administration skills drive automation, eliminate toil, and enable companies to focus on the end-to-end reliability of business services. SREs act as a bridge between the engineering team and smart operations by facilitating resilient engineering design. They also provide emergency response for critical incidents, ensure service reliability and availability, perform capacity planning and management, analyze consumption patterns, and forecast for cloud services.
The Proof of Better IT Operations
A large technology and healthcare conglomerate leveraged Wipro’s approach to transform its digital command center, automate its PaaS capabilities, and achieve catalog-based end-to-end operations across all of its cloud environments. This integration and operational model resulted in a 12% effort reduction, a 60% improvement in business acceptance, enabled continuous releases, and reduced the IT spend by 25%.
Applications managed on the cloud require a differentiated approach, one that has well-defined cloud governance, engineering, DevSecOps and an observability framework. To enhance their business value and unlock the full value of cloud-first strategy, companies need to design a comprehensive cloud operations construct.
About The Author
Harsha S Bhat
Practice Director, Wipro
Harsha is an Integrated Solution Architect with Wipro’s AMS practice focusing on next-gen application services offerings. He has spent 20 years in IT with experience in solution design, deal solution architecting for large and complex IT Outsourcing, Digital Transformation, Cloud, and Modernization pursuits.