Organizations are looking to the Cloud for innovation and accelerating business change. However, very few have a clear understanding of what is required to build a fully synchronized Cloud enterprise. Primarily because Cloud is a vast technology area - there are multiple types of Cloud, varied Cloud strategies, and the implications of Cloud cuts across various layers in an organization. Enterprise-wide cloud adoption seems like a herculean task owing to the effort involved in evaluating the IT portfolio, choosing a transformation approach, articulating the business objectives, and tackling change management.

That said, moving to the Cloud is not a good-to-do thing anymore. In this age of digital disruption, Cloud is a necessity to stay competitive and relevant.

The gap in cloud adoption

Over the last decade, many organizations fueled their investments to reap the benefits of Cloud. According to an IDG study, 77% of enterprises have at least one application or a portion of their enterprise computing infrastructure in the Cloud. Take the case of Netflix for instance. They migrated their in-house data centers to the Cloud to tackle surges in traffic during peak times. Cloud helped them scale cost-effectively by being able to expand their customer base without having to invest in infrastructure and maintenance.

However, organizations have only scratched the surface when it comes to harnessing the power of Cloud for their business. In an O’Reilly survey of 600 global Cloud practitioners, SMEs and CxOs, only 68% said they have adopted native Cloud and the 30% that have not adopted Cloud yet, see great potential in it in the coming years.

Why should you invest in Cloud-Native Applications?

• Business agility: Cloud enables businesses to build applications that are suitable for any cloud without making changes. This allows an easy and faster shift to different cloud infrastructure.
  
• The benefit of automation: Cloud allows automation, which means businesses can eliminate error and improve productivity by automating routine and repetitive tasks.
  
• Faster go-to-market leading to the competitive edge: Companies can build applications faster and deliver to rapidly changing customer expectations, at a lower cost.
  
• Always online environment: Building apps on the Cloud requires systems that have no downtime. This ensures that your systems have robust and reliable architecture.
  

Different approaches, varied Cloud models, and lack of strategy have created unsynchronized

Cloud pockets for most organizations. Some have been overzealous and over-invested; while others have not managed to even put in place the bare bones of a Cloud infrastructure. In fact, in some cases, due to the haphazard adoption, the IT architectures have become more complex than before the Cloud.

Also, disparities in the 3 key elements of Cloud adoption – People, Process, and Technology, have led to a siloed Cloud presence in large organizations. Upskilling the workforce, their existing capabilities, and operating model is definitely a challenge for organizations to achieve quickly. This leads to smaller teams aligning themselves to Cloud adoption in pockets. Similarly, with processes and technology, customer-facing next-gen apps are easier to move to Cloud without having to wait on the whole organization to be process-ready.

The gap in cloud adoption

Over the last decade, many organizations fueled their investments to reap the benefits of Cloud. According to an IDG study, 77% of enterprises have at least one application or a portion of their enterprise computing infrastructure in the Cloud. Take the case of Netflix for instance. They migrated their in-house data centers to the Cloud to tackle surges in traffic during peak times. Cloud helped them scale cost-effectively by being able to expand their customer base without having to invest in infrastructure and maintenance.

However, organizations have only scratched the surface when it comes to harnessing the power of Cloud for their business. In an O’Reilly survey of 600 global Cloud practitioners, SMEs and CxOs, only 68% said they have adopted native Cloud and the 30% that have not adopted Cloud yet, see great potential in it in the coming years.

The next few years in native Cloud adoption

Gartner’s recent Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing removed Cloud from an emerging technology and has reached the slope of enlightenment. What this means is that industries have a good understanding of Cloud and are now ready for mainstream adoption.

The full value of Cloud Computing comes from having a holistic strategy that is aligned with digital transformation for organizations. Cloud will act as a multiplier that can create next-gen IT for growth and innovation by leveraging technologies like IoT, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.

From the High-Tech industry perspective, a synchronized, fast and accessible Cloud will be quintessential to process data and synthesize it for digital transformation. Working with multiple Cloud types – public, private and hybrid, High-Tech companies will work toward achieving efficiency and security to expand into IoT and sophisticated data processing.

However, before that, there are some challenges that high-tech organizations need to investigate:

The right skillset: Adopting the Cloud for businesses means re-thinking ways of working, culture, and upskilling people to work and build in a new environment. For large and small organizations, skillset is a major roadblock that they should gear up for.

Legacy applications: While some companies try to lift and shift large monolith applications, it will not work in the longer run. Businesses should look at new ways to build and design or break up existing legacy apps before moving them on to the Cloud.

Security compliance: Working with Cloud gets systems exposed to a variety of data, systems and technologies. Handling security in a cloud-based environment is becoming a challenge for most companies.

Adopting the right framework for native Cloud

Every organization follows a unique cloud journey based on business goals and strategy. The right framework and approach is essential to achieve the desired outcomes.

Recently, we worked with a leading high-tech company to support their Cloud migration journey. Our Cloud migration framework helped us understand their IT landscape, assess their applications and servers, and provide a detailed migration plan. As a result, the client achieved increased resiliency with enhanced disaster recovery capabilities in case of failure. We were able to reduce their cost of operations significantly due to elimination of managing the associated hardware. A step-by-step planned approach helped us deliver exponential business benefits aligned to their goals. The framework made their journey to the Cloud easy, as they were able to anticipate what comes next and plan in advance.

Our framework involves five steps that can aid the adoption of native Cloud.

Cloud strategy and organization readiness: Building a strategy is the most crucial step before Cloud adoption. The approach must be unique to your industry and business. You should be able to map your requirements to your business goals and objectives.

Cloud assessment and architecture: Assessing your company’s appetite for change, business objectives and what you expect from your cloud investment is a crucial step. Companies that have adopted Cloud in pockets often get stuck when it comes to a more extensive cloud adoption journey.

Roadmap and business case: Cloud cannot be viewed as a technology investment alone. It involves the coming together of people, process, and technology aligned to business objectives and outcomes for their customers. Hence drafting a business case for change that includes budgets, cost savings, upskilling, and new operating model that enables your business to achieve speed, innovation, and efficiency is essential.

Migration and testing: The cloud migration plan involves testing applications in the cloud environment. Testing needs to be done against parameters for functionality, stability and compatibility.

Management & operations: And finally, you will need to design, oversee and monitor cloud operations continually. This is essential to drive efficiencies and optimization of the cloud investment.

No matter the stage of Cloud adoption your business is at – just starting out or entrenched in your technology and business strategy - having a framework will help you assess, identify gaps, and plan for real benefits of the Cloud.

How are you managing your Cloud journey? Talk to me about the Cloud roadmap for your business at ankit.ghosh@wipro.com

Ankit Ghosh

Head - Cloud Transformation Solution

He has over 20+ years' experience in the Technology industry. Responsible for strategizing the architecture, deployment and automation of Cloud Infrastructure with defined revenue growth for technology vertical and planning & prioritization of strategic client engagement from architectural and cost optimization to drive joint proposition with different cloud providers. Managing the delivery of large transformation initiative for strategic customers as required for complex engagements.