Enterprise Cloud Strategy – Facts, FAQs and Implementation Steps
Without the cloud, enterprises are likely to spend about 80% of their budget on managing the legacy infrastructure (hardware + software). This is because enterprises maintain their private data centers that become costly to upscale in conjunction with their ever-increasing business needs.
Today, implementing a cloud strategy is a mainstay of every enterprise that aims to achieve — decrease in expenditure, less maintenance of data center, and increased focus on innovation. The economy of scale offered by the cloud is worth its weight in gold for enterprises.
And now that COVID-19 is affecting businesses across the globe, cloud computing is gaining even more traction as it promises business continuity and all-time remote access. But, it is easier said than done. Migrating to the cloud is a complex process that requires a fool-proof strategy to abide by. To leverage the power of cloud computing on a holistic level, you would have to take a step forward and understand the cloud journey before getting on with it.
So, let’s get started.
Why Worry About Your Enterprise’s Cloud Strategy? An enterprise cloud strategy lays down cloud adoption recommendations for your business and a fool-proof plan for implementation. Why do you need a cloud strategy? Having an enterprise cloud strategy ensures fewer hindrances along with the cloud migration and adoption journey while maximizing business benefits. Devising a cloud strategy starts with analyzing your organization’s current status, deciding for a cloud migration strategy that will suit your business and functional requirements, and how this cloud digital transformation wave will change the enterprise dynamics.
Types of Enterprise Cloud Strategy There are various cloud strategies available that you could choose from, but your finalized strategy should align with your business needs and scaling capability. According to the Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report, as much as 93% of respondents vouch for a multi-cloud strategy that includes hybrid cloud too. Whereas, only a few rely on single public or single private in the current times.
Let’s see what each of these cloud strategies imply:
1. Single Public This is a type of strategy where computing, cloud storage, and software are made available by the cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis, i.e., you only pay for what you use. In the public cloud, providers manage millions of data centers worldwide to maintain all-time availability and throughput. The public cloud strategy is beneficial for enterprises looking to save on maintaining legacy infrastructure while an opportunity to focus on core business functionalities.
2. Single Private This is a type of strategy where the cloud you host your data and applications, belongs explicitly to you. The technology stack that matches the business needs is hosted by the cloud provider in an on-premise data center. The private cloud strategy is beneficial for enterprises that cannot risk moving critical data off-premises, and are highly concerned about data security.
3. Hybrid Cloud A hybrid cloud is a mix of private and public clouds. Enterprises prefer hybrid cloud strategy as it the best deal, and they can maintain some applications on-premises while moving others to the public cloud.
All enterprises are in the hybrid state at one point when migrating to the cloud. This is when you have already moved some applications to the cloud, and some still run on-premises.
4. Multiple-Public This is a type of strategy where an enterprise relies on more than one cloud service model (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) of the same type (private or public) from more than one cloud provider. Some have an understanding that a multi-cloud strategy is the same as a hybrid cloud, but it is not. This is the best and the most popular strategy that enterprises rely upon as it offers an orchestrated cloud experience.
Commonly Asked Questions When Developing an Enterprise Cloud Strategy Here are some commonly asked questions that align with enterprise cloud strategy.
1. What is a Cloud-First Strategy? An enterprise that prioritizes cloud as the primary mode of running their legacy infrastructure is referred to as cloud-first. That is, whenever an organization needs
new infrastructure or applications, they will give priority to the cloud over onpremise deployment. Cloud-First is a prominent strategy that is helping remotefirst organizations evolve.
2. How are Cost and Time Related when Implementing an Enterprise Cloud Strategy? The time you take to devise a cloud strategy framework, followed by its implementation, decides the corresponding expenditure. There are three phases of migration that can be classified as — aggressive, moderate, and slow. Here’s what each of them implies:
Aggressive: When you decide to move
50%
of
your
legacy
infrastructure to the cloud in one year. An aggressive plan will prove beneficial in the long run but involves higher risk and cost of migration.
Moderate: When you decide to move about
30%
of
your
legacy
infrastructure to the cloud in one year.
Slow: When you decide to move about
10%
of
your
legacy
infrastructure to the cloud in one year. The cost of migration will be less,
but
it
will
affect
the
organization’s overall growth due to its slow transformation.
If you ask what is the best cloud strategy that reduces costs and increases efficiencies, the answer would be a moderate strategy where you move to the cloud while maintaining a balance.
3. Is Multi-Cloud Strategy Mainstream? A multi-cloud strategy allows benefiting from the best services that the popular cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Platform provide. Yes, it is the new normal, and even Flexera’s state of cloud report for 2020 says that 93% of respondents (n=554) use the multi-cloud strategy, i.e., a combination of multi public and hybrid cloud.
Five Steps for Planning a Cloud Strategy for Your Enterprise Creating an enterprise strategy is essential before migrating to the cloud. The strategy may vary from enterprise to enterprise. However, here are some steps that every enterprise cloud strategy should follow.
1. Creating an Enterprise Cloud Strategy Team For ensuring that your cloud adoption journey stays on track, creating a cloud strategy team becomes essential. This team is generally headed by the CTO of your enterprise and comprises IT and networking teams.
The team holds the responsibility to build a cloud strategy roadmap and checklist, ensure its successful implementation, and communicate with the stakeholders from time to time. The cloud strategy team also is the key decision-maker when choosing a cloud deployment model, cloud migration strategy, and cloud providers.
The core responsibilities of the team can be summarised as follows: 
Making
faster
and informed
decisions when choosing from among various cloud strategies
Maintaining communication with the stakeholders
Choosing between applications that need to be moved to the cloud vs the applications that will be maintained on-premises
Framing and implementing a cloud strategy implementation plan to address
hindrances
towards
successful cloud adoption
Analyzing, planning, and managing cloud as new realities evolve
2. Analyze Applications Thoroughly Before framing your enterprise cloud strategy, analyzing applications, and their relevance to the cloud becomes imperative. Decide between applications that need to stay on-premises vs the applications that need to move to the cloud.
For instance, mission-critical applications ought to stay on-premises. The same applies to applications that are out-dated and need to be jettisoned. Moving such applications to the cloud will only add to the costs with minimum to no benefits in return.
In short, if the risk to move a particular application to the cloud is higher, maintain it on-premises.
3. Building A Hybrid Cloud Strategy Roadmap Not all applications and services can be moved to the public cloud. Where some are maintained on-premises on a private cloud, some need to be abandoned as they are no more valuable.
Here’s a hybrid cloud strategy that you need to understand for getting one step ahead in the cloud adoption journey.
a. Rightsize Goal: Modernization with the Microservices Architecture
Enterprises confuse cloud migration with simply rehosting their applications from on-premises to the cloud, i.e., lift and shift. However, this strategy is not an ideal solution as optimizations are essential in order to adjust to the new environment. The applications need to be reconfigured so that they can be cloud-ready, i.e., they need to be resized. This is possible by breaking down the monolithic application structure and adopting the microservices architecture.
Microservices architecture focuses on developing an application with smaller modules that are loosely coupled. This reduces the cost and effort involved in cloud adoption while adding flexibility to iterate whenever necessary.
A cloud strategy example — Netflix took almost seven years to transform its applications and adopt the microservices architecture to move to Amazon Web Services. The reconfigured application structure maximized service availability and reduced IT costs as opposed to on-premise management of resources.
b. Retire Goal: Looking for a Corresponding SaaS Solution
It is better to look for alternative SaaS solutions for applications that require to be updated or should be retired, as identified in the step above. This is a preferable step if you wish to trim down the time to successful cloud adoption. It is not only cost-savvy but also saves you from the effort of developing an application all over again. There are third-party SaaS product development companies available that help develops applications that suit different business needs. The cloud strategy team needs to identify these providers, weigh in their pros and cons, market share, and even pricing before finalizing the best fit. For example, your relation management software that is getting obsolete with time can be replaced with available third-party CRM software online.
4. Reskilling and Upskilling Once you implement your cloud strategy, the routine IT operations will witness a significant shift. This will further lead to a change in the roles and responsibilities of the IT department, for which your enterprise should prepare in advance. The new model is, ‘You own it, you build it,” giving single teams ownership of every stage of development and requiring that IT and the business operate in lockstep with one another.— Charlie Li, Capgemini’s chief cloud officer
Reskilling and upskilling is a safe strategy to implement where everybody across the enterprise can learn and adapt to the new working environment. It will reduce burnout and productivity, the greater agenda of any workplace.
As the traditional roles will continue to prevail in the background, the newer clouddriven roles will evolve and hold precedence. Here is a chart that serves as an example of how enterprise roles will change after implementing the cloud strategy.
Traditional Roles vs Evolving Roles
Traditional Role UI, UX Designer
Developer
Cloud-Driven Role
Process Engineer(ensures orchestrated and hindrance free loud experience)
Cloud Architect (leverage cloud for ensuring business benefits) Engineering and DevOps (ensures continuous deployment)
Tester
Data Analyst
Engineering and DevOps (ensures continuous deployment)
<="" p="" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none !important; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;"> Data Scientist (Provides insightful data that offers value)
Applications Monitoring and Support
Network Engineer
Engineering and DevOps (ensures continuous deployment)
Engineering and DevOps (ensures continuous deployment) Edge and Wireless Networking (ensures secure remote-access)
Solution Manager
Relationship Manager (cloud advisor) Business Architect (ensures the best use of cloud assets)
Another significant change in the organization is the amalgamation of â&#x20AC;&#x201D; development and operations department, thus paving the way for the DevOps culture.
Introduction to DevOps DevOps = Development Team + Operations Team
DevOps is the new reality that has led to a cross-functional setup in the teams that have managed to bridge the communication gap across the organizational culture. With the cloud, deploying new applications or new features to the existing applications on the cloud becomes normal. This means you would have to appoint the development team to create applications using agile development practices.
Now, as the development teams step in, so would the testers. Thus, breaking the silos that exist between developers, tests, and operations departments.
The takeaway is that you need to prepare, reskill, and upskill your staff to know their changing roles and responsibilities and to train them to what lies ahead. This is an essential step to ensure that cloud strategy best practices are followed.
5. Implementation When implementing the cloud strategy, the first thing that needs to be decided is as to what part of the legacy infrastructure will be moved first. It is not a one-time effort, but a long-term initiative.
For instance, you are moving a large pile of books from one room to another. Carrying them all at once will be challenging, and the burden might be too much to handle. Moreover, you might fall too.
On the other hand, if you carry only limited books at a time, you can easily carry the weight while ensuring the pile stays intact. The same is the case with cloud migration. You need to lift and shift in partitions. But, here the operations team also needs to prioritize what needs to be moved first based on your business requirements.
Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a migration strategy prioritization example by Microsoft:
According to the diagram above, choosing low complexity, low business risk workloads should hold priority. If you start small, you can learn and implement better when it comes to complex and high-risk workloads.
Ideally, this should be the order of movement in the cloud:
First Phase: Development and Testing (DevTest) environments, Web apps, new
products
and
solutions,
redesigned solutions and products
Second Phase: Regulatory solutions, High
Input/Output
transactional
processing
online systems
(OLTP)
Third Phase: Secure high-value assets (HVA)
systems,
public
key
infrastructure (PKI) systems, and legacy source control systems
Next, follow this cloud migration plan when migrating each of the workloads over to the cloud.
Six Steps for Implementing the Cloud Migration Plan Process 1. Analysis
Inference
Identify the gaps, i.e., what applications you have vs how you want them to be Plan for the change in the application architecture accordingly Coordinate with information security and risk management teams to ensure security and privacy controls are in place
2. Application Migration
Create a basic version of the application loaded with minimum data on the cloud If the application is running on a virtual machine, you can proceed to move the application on the cloud without changes Optimize the application to offer performance, scalability, and security
3. Networking 4. Data Migration
Set up a virtual private network (VPN)
Move the data in primitive form (with the help of automated tools) either to the relational or non-relational location on the cloud You can also rebuild the data model to achieve performance, security, and resilience benefits Create a data recovery plan or resilience planning ensuring business continuity
5. Optimization and Testing
After moving your applications and data, perform performance testing on the cloud
Measure, identify and fix performance gaps if any
6. Operation and Management
Deploy application tracing and monitoring tools offered by cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Use the incoming stats from these tools to monitor performance, identify bugs, troubleshoot, and even analyze traffic Get access to a single and holistic view of applications at one place
Conclusion Devising and implementing an enterprise cloud strategy ensures a fool-proof execution of the cloud migration and adoption process. The cloud adoption changes how businesses and IT operate. It is not just another change management initiative, but an entire digital transformation project that requires priority and expertise.
In this write-up, we have covered the enterprise cloud strategy steps that ensure successful migration and deployment of the cloud. It starts with creating an enterprise cloud strategy team, analyzing applications, and deciding what should move to the cloud vs what should be maintained on-premises. Next, building a hybrid cloud strategy roadmap, considering reskilling and upskilling, and finally moving ahead with migration in phases.
The more strategically and patiently you move, the better the implementation and success of your enterprise cloud strategy.
Source - https://www.netsolutions.com/insights/enterprise-cloud-strategy/