VIEWPOINT
LOOK BEFORE YOU MAKE THE LEAP THINKING CLOUD? THINK AGAIN, WRITES JOE BAGULEY, VP & CTO EMEA, VMWARE
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t might have been around as a concept for more than a decade but, for many organisations, cloud computing is now becoming core to the way they can actually deliver their ‘business’. Others, however, are joining the ‘cloud club’ – often, it seems, without really knowing why. They just want cloud. The problem is, they are finding it is not as simple as they thought. It’s not just the next place to ‘run your stuff’, but a whole new world of opportunities. Cloud should not be about making the same mistakes you already made but cheaper somewhere else, it should be about learning from the past, righting those wrongs and doing things differently. Simply wanting to join the cloud club is not the starting point. Without knowledge of what it can do for your business, cloud will never live up to its ideal, but simply be a place to repeat mistakes in a slightly different way. So, if you are thinking about ‘going to the cloud’, think again. 42
CXO INSIGHT ME
AUGUST 2021
From cloud-centric to app-centric Today, businesses must recognise the problems they are likely to encounter tomorrow. They need to understand what the digital and application landscape is going to look like in three to five years and make decisions accordingly. Data is going to be everywhere, with the volume created, captured, copied, and consumed annually worldwide set to more than double in the next 3 years. And increasingly, it is going to be residing anywhere but the traditional datacenter. This is going to have a major influence on how companies engage with customers, and in turn how they use apps to facilitate these interactions. That’s why rushing into cloud now could well hamper how effectively business-critical apps that need to use distributed data in the future can operate. An app that does great things now, for example, is going to need to adapt over time, and the environment
it is hosted in will need to do the same. An app that’s been deployed somewhere just because it’s ‘in the cloud’ could well struggle to meet those requirements. So ‘app-first’ rather than ‘cloud-first’ is your first strategic guiding light. Then there’s the challenge that, even as they rush to the cloud, many organisations are still unpicking their legacy infrastructure, technology they’ve probably held on to for longer than they should because, frankly, it was so resourceintensive implementing it they didn’t feel they could cut their losses earlier and didn’t have an exit plan. From spiraling costs to deploying environments without first considering how apps are going to use them, there is a real risk of experiencing the same problems that legacy IT created, just somewhere else this time - in the cloud. Ultimately, however, the biggest issue is that there isn’t one silver bullet. When we talk about cloud, we’re actually talking about a whole variety, from companies running apps on-prem in their data center, through software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps like Salesforce and Workday, even app components as a service like communications, to the public clouds of the likes of Google and Amazon, all the way to highly distributed ‘edge clouds’. There are even sector-specific clouds, such as the financial sector developing a FinTech cloud, with all the compliance and security controls required for a highly regulated sector. CIOs expect the number of clouds – private, public and edge environments – they use to build, manage and run their apps to increase 53% in the next three years. This proliferation brings with it complexity – a VMware study noted that 63% of organisations state inconsistencies between clouds as one of the top multicloud challenges. To business-centric, for any app, over any cloud This is why it’s so important to understand what cloud will do for the business as a whole, and specifically how the business can use cloud services to develop, modernise and deploy apps as fast and securely as possible. Just imagine what a business could achieve if it didn’t matter what cloud their apps were in because they could use the same tools to manage everything?
