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AccelerateCloud Adoption

A roadmap for elevating your business and realizing your future in the cloud

Contributors:

James Dunn, Christian Nilsson, Steve Berrey, Roger Newman, Daniel Tovey, Daisy Recto

2 | Cloudreach.comAccelerate Cloud Adoption

3 Introduction

5 Cloud today

6 Cloud Computing Business Drivers

7 Myths

14 Benefits

16 Challenges

17 Cloud Adoption Journey

19 Cloud Adoption Framework

20 Stakeholders

21 Strategy

22 Agile organization

23 Governance

24 Security & compliance

25 Cloud education and enablement

26 Modernization

27 Operations & service management

29 Innovation from technology

30 Key Takeaways

Table of Contents


Harnessing the power of steam fueled the industrial revolution in the 18th century. Electricity fueled mass production in the 19th century. The invention of IT and advance of electronics automated production in the 20th century. Each of these technological advances opened up exciting, new opportunities for pioneers to evolve and improve.

Now, the advancement of Cloud technology is turning an enterprise’s IT estate into a driver of innovation and differentiation. Adopting Cloud technology accelerates your digital transformation efforts, enabling you to harness a brand new suite of tools and services that can help elevate, not just your IT organization, but the people and processes throughout your business.

If you look at the history of technology, innovation fundamentally disrupts the economic landscape.

Cloud Computing Business Drivers

Cloud Adoption Journey

Cloud Adoption Framework

Intro

1 2 3

With this eBook, we provide a roadmap for accelerating Cloud adoption.

Introduction


For leaders in all of the functions mentioned above, we hope this eBook will be seen as a referenceable guide that you can look back to, at any point, to help direct your strategic conversations.

We hope there are many key takeaways; however, if there is one overarching message that we want to communicate throughout, it is that cloud adoption is an all-encompassing transformation that will influence your business well beyond your IT organization. We are not just talking about a technological change, but a full business transformation that will have a profound impact on people and processes. As such, your internal conversations about adopting cloud need to involve a variety of stakeholders to be successful.

While strategic conversations around traditional IT were held in the realm of the CIO and CTO, successful conversations about Cloud adoption will require input from other functions, such as Finance, HR and Procurement. These discussions will often not be easy, and will require many of you to completely rethink how your business operates. However, if your goals are aligned, the conclusions that you reach will form a blueprint for success that you can follow and develop for years to come.

Cloud adoption is an all encompassing transformation that will influence your business well beyond your IT organization.


At this time, Cloud technology was at the very early stages of its maturity cycle and our customers were limited to early adopters and innovators. The impression of Cloud, especially among larger enterprises, was that it was for startups and small businesses, with many dismissing its ability to take off and enable real change.

Over the past ten years, this perspective has shifted significantly. Enterprise leaders are drawn to the ability to reduce project delivery overhead, remove sunk costs and wastage associated with their traditional on-premise operating models and have begun to understand how they can gain value from Cloud technology.

This has been helped by the evolution of the technology. Cloud Service Providers have continued to innovate and offer better tools and services. Where, 10 years ago, you could only provision compute and storage from your provider, today you have access to an ecosystem of hundreds of tools and services. Some of these allow you to harness machine learning and AI capabilities that can significantly enhance the value of your data insights and help differentiate your business.

Cloud today

Enterprises now understand the value of the Cloud beyond exiting their DCs.

More focus on enabling innovation and improving business agility.

Most early adopters and innovators understood the potential of cloud technology. More focus on migrations and reducing technical debt.

Cloud (2019)

Cloud (2009)

The public Cloud market has changed dramatically since Cloudreach was born in 2009.


Cloud Computing Business Drivers 1

Before you settle on your objectives and start planning and strategizing your Cloud journey, it is important to understand the territory you will be traversing. In this section, we will cover some of the myths, benefits and challenges associated with public Cloud.


Myths

As with any emerging technology, Cloud has collected its fair share of myths and misconceptions that can be disguised pitfalls for unwary businesses.

It depends on how you adapt your financial operating model. When you move to the Cloud, you leave behind the predictable, but often expensive, fixed costs of a CapEx cycle; where you invest, maintain, and upgrade hardware. You find yourself in the flexible, scalable world of an OpEx model.

This introduces its own set of challenges as you learn to manage costs in a decentralized, consumption-based environment. However, through understanding how Cloud resources are used, the intricacies of an OpEx model and by establishing effective governance, your opportunities for reducing costs will emerge.

There are certain misconceptions that operating in the Cloud is automatically cheaper than in a traditional on-premise data center. This isn’t necessarily so.Myths

Cloud is cheaper1#


Myths

Cloud transformation in an enterprise is commonly driven by a wider business objective to be more innovative and agile. While adopting Cloud technology may be seen as a catalyst, your success depends on aligning your people and processes in order to achieve these goals.

If your objectives demand faster delivery and increased efficiency, you need to ensure you are harbouring a culture that will support these ways of working.

Cloud is only a technology change2#


Myths

The impacts of cloud transformation are not solely contained to your IT organization. They ripple outwards, having profound effects on other functions within your business.

There are many touch points where your IT Organization interacts with your Finance, Procurement and Security teams. Any changes to IT will inevitably cause friction and disruption at these intersections, especially if your IT organization is trying to adopt a more agile mindset.

If you understand the extensive impact of cloud, you can minimize the disruptive ripple effect by ensuring your other functions update their governance models to empower a more decentralized, automated compliance process.

Cloud onlyimpacts IT3#


Myths

Cloud is not just about hosting your infrastructure on external servers, it provides the building blocks to scale and optimize your business. When you move to the Cloud, you gain access to your chosen Cloud Service Provider’s (CSP) extensive suite of tools and services. This enables you to enhance how your

business operates, innovates and succeeds at your fingertips.

This provides an opportunity to modernize your applications and increase their capability beyond what is possible in a data center.

Cloud is justsomeone else’s server4#


Myths

A comprehensive Cloud strategy will help align the rest of the business towards a common purpose and set the vision and principles by which Cloud should be adopted. This is an opportunity to do some soul searching as a business and ask why you are transforming in the first place?

Without understanding why you are adopting Cloud and what value it is providing for different areas of your business, you are essentially just shifting your technology stack.

Without an effective cloud strategy, you cannot address your on-premise challenges and maximize the potential value of the Cloud.

For the same reason why it is vital to have a blueprint before building a house, a Cloud strategy will form the foundation of your Cloud adoption journey and will define your Cloud Operating Model.

Cloud requiresno strategy5#


Myths

Secure CSP Data CentersFrom a physical perspective, public Cloud is, at the very least, as secure as a traditional data center. Yes, all of your databases and servers are offsite but CSP data centers are some of the most secure buildings in the world. Their exact locations are often obfuscated and access inside is extremely limited. They can offer levels of physical security that few enterprises can match.

Monitoring and ReliabilityFrom a logical and architectural perspective, the Cloud provides you with software-based tools to monitor and protect the flow of information in and out of your Cloud resources. The Cloud enables you to reconstruct your environment from the ground up, with software-driven security built into the infrastructure.

Access ManagementCSPs provide tools that allow you to centrally control access, effectively enable immutable logging and monitoring for security analytics, and control key management, to name a few.

Deployment AutomationThey also have deployment tools to manage and maintain the creation and decommission of resources. This allows you to securely automate many of your security practices, as well as ensure your infrastructure is trackable, traceable and configurable. This all helps streamline the implementation of, and ensure compliance with your security policies.

Cloud isnot secure6#

Cloud enables a different, software-driven approach toachieve your security policies while reducing administration overheads and empowering your IT team to spend more time focusing on innovation.


Myths

It is true that Cloud allows elastic computing infrastructure, which

can grow and shrink to fit traffic patterns in near real-time. It is also

true that it offers unprecedented ways of ensuring high-availability

and reliability of your data. What is less known, is that for IaaS, none

of these benefits come out-of-the-box. They are achieved via careful

planning and good design.

A lift-and-shift migration to the Cloud will not make your systems

offer any increased availability than they did on-premise. Servers in

the Cloud do not automatically resize themselves when needed and

backups are not automatically always available. Just like on-premise,

this needs to be configured.

7# Cloud automatically makes us scale and gives unprecedented reliability

With the right knowledge, planning and effort, Cloud can offer better availability, reliability and scale at a lower cost than any on-premise equivalent.


Benefits

If properly managed, Cloud adoption is a catalyst for your wider digital transformation and provides an immense opportunity for organizations to:

Increase efficiency

Adopting Cloud provides an excellent opportunity to increase

operational efficiency - especially relating to technology and costs.

Cloud can offer a way to address technical debt and revitalize your

technology choices. If your Cloud adoption goals include improving

efficiency and optimizing performance, you can use this as a chance

to refactor and modernize your existing applications, enhancing the

value they provide your business. Also with the right governance and

cost management procedures in place, you have the opportunity to

be more cost-efficient.

Benefits

Enable scalable growth

Cloud platforms are designed to be responsive to you and your

customers’ needs, easily growing and shrinking as required to ensure

optimum application performance and efficiency, while offering high

reliability, irrespective of scale.

In traditional on-premise environments it can take weeks to scale-

up a system. In Cloud, vertical-scaling adjustments can be made in

minutes. In many cases, you can even benefit from elastic services -

which will shrink or grow, automatically responding to sudden spikes

in demand for certain workloads.


Benefits

Improve business agility

Businesses want to quickly respond to changing market conditions

and stay ahead of their competitors. The ability to innovate quickly

and at scale is a benefit that all will want to access during their

Cloud journey.

But what does agility look like? From an IT perspective, it involves

moving away from traditional cultures focused on consistency,

maintaining operational integrity at all costs and long, drawn out

release cycles. Many organizations will try to embrace a DevOps

model, empowering their development teams to make key

decisions, as well as experiment and adopt a fail-fast mentality;

allowing them to develop, launch and rescind products quickly.

Increase customer focus & innovation

Moving to the Cloud provides new opportunities to modernize your

existing applications and remove technical debt. It also allows you

to experiment with new ways to generate value from your data and

differentiate from your competitors.

Your Cloud Service Provider gives you access to a whole new toolkit

that you can immediately use. This provides you with Innovation

as a Service, where, at relatively low cost, you can experiment and

develop new products services. This can be done quickly (in a matter

of hours rather than over a period of months) in a relatively low stakes

environment and you can receive feedback from your market instantly.


Challenges

Skills shortage Cloud engineers need to be multi-skilled and are required to perform new functions such as Cloud migration, machine learning and AI, Cloud operations and Cloud security.

Cultural change Organizations need to manage the cultural shift from legacy thinking towards a more agile approach of working with the Cloud.

Ripple Effect Cloud transformation won’t just impact your IT team; its effects will ripple out to other teams in other departments like Human Resources, Finance, Procurement, Legal etc.

ChallengesChange in large, complex enterprises is always going to be difficult to navigate. Even if you have a clear understanding of the myths and benefits of Cloud, your adoption journey is going to come across some hurdles along the way. Here are some of the common problems faced by enterprises as they mature in the Cloud.

Implementation of security The introduction of software-driven security can cause disruption as it involves revisiting regulations and your security requirements, and evaluating policies that may have been in place for years.

Cloud Governance While the democratization of Cloud could be seen as a positive enabler of more agile working practices, it can lead to ‘shadow IT’ and the potential issues of security, reliability and effectiveness associated with technology not centrally authorized by the organizations IT team.

Cloud Wastage Wastage can be caused from idle or over provisioned resources, as well as through a failure to successfully adapt your governance around the different finance and procurement models that exist in the Cloud.


Cloud Adoption Journey2

Cloud adoption is not a straightforward journey, it is an incremental and iterative process. Companies will begin their new Cloud adoption initiatives at different stages of maturity. Some of you will be taking your first steps into Cloud, defining your strategy and assessing your business.

Others may have previous experience working with Cloud environments but now want to take it to the next level with advanced tools, services and automation.


Create organizational alignment by building the business case and strategy for cloud adoption. Determine your path for cloud-readiness through proof of concepts and assessment of your operating model across people, process and technology.

Change is easy if you build solid foundations. You need the right skills, governance framework and technical design to operate securely and efficiently.

Effectively scale cloud adoption across your business by adopting an agile culture and finding the right champions for change, whilst migrating applications at a rapid pace.

Continuously improve by automating business decisions, going cloud-native, and using AI/ML to explore new business opportunities. Use data-driven insights to achieve previously unreachable goals.

Optimize your cloud implementations with cost optimization, automation, and improved processes for governance and rapid application deployment.

Goal: Organizational Alignment

Goal: Understand and obtain new capabilities and begin experimenting

Goal: Business innovation through technology

Goal: Optimize cloud capabilities with Agile DevOps & DataOps

Goal: Decommission legacy technology and start to deliver agile applications.

1. Align 2. Build

3. Scale

4. Optimize

5. Innovate

It is important to establish where your organization is at different stages of maturity so the right framework can be put in place to help you drive business value and achieve your objectives.

Cloud adoption journey


Cloud Adoption Framework3

With a clear understanding of where you are, and what you want to achieve in your cloud journey, we recommend building a framework that maps out your key initiatives, how they will develop over time and who is responsible for their development.


Stakeholders

CEO CIO CTO CFO Head of Ops CISO Head of Development

HR

Strategy

Agile Organization

Governance

Security & Compliance

Cloud Education & Enablement

Modernization

Operations & Service Management

Innovation from Technology

Knowing who to engage for each step in the cloud enablement process and building a team of thought-leaders, ensures successful cloud adoption.


As you mature in the cloud, your strategy will adapt and evolve but it will remain the one source of truth for all stakeholders to ensure your transformation remains on course.

The strategy should involve input from stakeholders who are all directly and indirectly impacted by Cloud transformation - from the CEO/CIO/CTO to the FO and HR teams - to ensure all are aligned. These discussions should help define key business drivers, including; the problems that need solving, the indicators of success, and the overall objectives. It should also consider your people, processes and technology to help form your Cloud operating model.

Typical business objectives that should be considered are:

• What do you want to achieve? • How will Cloud help you achieve this?

• What is your success criteria?

Strategy

CEO CIO CTO CFO Head of Ops

Stakeholders Involved

Head of Development


During your transformation, the realization of your business goals depends on the ability of your organization to adopt an agile mindset.

If your objectives are centered around enabling innovation, increasing efficiency, and accelerating delivery, then your IT organization will need to feel empowered to make quick, responsive decisions and embrace experimentation. As the people in your IT team upskill and work in a more agile and innovative way, you can start taking full advantage of the benefits of your Cloud transformation.

However, the impact of Cloud transformation will also likely have a wider and unexpected effect on people across your organization, in and outside of IT. It is advisable to work closely with other teams (eg. lines of business, IT operations, security, compliance and finance teams) and individuals, to align goals, understand the impacts and how to best respond. This will help you mitigate the impact of change and help you redefine and invigorate your culture.

With the right guardrails in place, cultural transformation towards a more agile, decentralized environment - focused on continuous delivery - will accelerate. The result of this shift will leave you with a collaborative, lean organization where teams are empowered to make decisions for themselves.

Agile organization

CEO CIO CTO CFO CISOHead of Ops


Head of Development


When you are trying to embrace a more agile and decentralized way of working, in a scalable environment with rapidly deployed services, it is very easy to lose control.

This introduces a number of risks related to security, financial, compliance etc. To prevent this

from happening, you need a governance model that can support and manage the estate as it

grows bigger and more complex.

Start defining your Cloud governance model by performing a risk and capability assessment

to understand the gaps in your existing model. Then, build a compliance plan that focuses on

leveraging your Cloud platform to ensure effective policies and guardrails are in place.

The Cloud enables the optimization and automation of governance within an organization, which

help accelerate the response to risk and market changes. However, the right processes must be

in place to establish this governance in the Cloud. Many businesses approach the management

of their governance model by developing a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE). This central unit of

‘pioneers’ or ‘evangelists’ are responsible for ushering change across the business and incubating

controls and best practices related to Cloud architecture and governance. Their focus is on

accelerating Cloud use while minimizing costs and risk.

Governance

CIO CTO CISOCFO


Head of Ops


As with governance, your security model also needs to adapt to the Cloud.

While traditional, perimeter-focused, security models are slow to scale and adapt, Cloud security needs to serve a scalable, ephemeral and changing environment that must empower speed and innovation without compromising security.

First, assess your existing security policies and map how they will interact with processes and workflows in the Cloud. This will help you decide how those policies will adapt, which security controls you need and which tools/vendors you want to work with.

Once you have reevaluated your security policies, you can use the tooling services available from your CSP and other Cloud vendors to integrate security into your build and deploy process. You can add automated security testing and gates to continuously check your applications and protect your system. You can also utilize logging and monitoring capabilities to give you an overview of your system and help manage it proactively.

By building a software-driven security system, you have a repeatable, revisable landscape that can be adapted, updated and scaled to respond to new business challenges and security threats.

Security & compliance

CIO CTO CISO


Head of Ops Head of Development


Moving to the Cloud requires a new set of skills, which can be acquired through upskilling existing employees or hiring new talent. It is important to create a framework for upskilling, onboarding and recruitment, which can scale

Cloud education and enablement within the business.

Firstly, you need to agree on the cloud vision and principles that your cloud team will follow. Then,

you need to define core cloud competencies and domains that will help drive value within your

business. These cloud competencies will help you assess the current gaps in skills and roles within

your business, which you can factor into your upskilling and recruitment process.

You can then set up a Cloud Education Program to produce “cloud champions,” which can help

drive further adoption. The goal here is to enable cloud-fluency across the organization (from

executives to enterprise architects to operations) and create a culture of continuous learning. That

way, your people are able to understand how to take advantage of the cloud in their everyday

activities and continuously add value to your business.

Cloud education & enablement

CTO Head of Development

HR & Facilities


Head of Ops


When you are first planning your move to the Cloud, you should carry out an assessment of your existing applications.

Modernization

CIO CTO CISO


This will allow you to identify which modernization and implementation strategy to go with, commonly referred to as the 6R’s:

These decisions should be driven by your business objectives.

Rehosting is a quick and cost-effective migration solution which is practical if you desire minimal impact on existing workflows. This approach will marginally save on costs, however it does little to accelerate you towards the benefits of cloud adoption. Replatforming an application or service, when the on-premise hardware or software reaches end-of-life, offers not only the opportunity to avoid CapEx investment but also to easily deliver scalability. For example, using database services.

Refactoring, by moving from virtual machines to PaaS services, delivers further improvements in effectiveness on costs, reliability and scalability. Another model of refactoring is to adopt the 12-factor application methodology when redesigning the applications.

If your goal is to scale your existing application, boost agility, exploit Cloud capabilities and realize greater value you will need to invest in transforming your apps via the PaaS services on offer from your CSP. This will allow you to easily integrate and deploy your applications, potentially with the latest machine learning, AI and data analytics tools and enhance the value of your assets.

• Rehost (lift-and-shift)• Replatform• Repurchase

• Refactor• Retire• Retain


Operating in the Cloud is different to operating in the data center.

This diagram highlights some of the fundamental principles of a Cloud operations team:

Operations & service management

It requires multi-skilled personnel, who are well-versed with Cloud-native tooling. Software-driven, automated processes that allow for instant scale create efficient guard rails and manage Cloud costs. It also needs to support regular feature releases and harbours a philosophy of continuous improvement .

To deliver in line with these principles, it is important to make sure you have defined an actionable roadmap for your Cloud transformation that is focussed on operational readiness. It is useful to segment your tools, skills and processes into different operational domains such as the ones described below. This helps you isolate how you plan and develop the evolution of your Cloud Operations capability and ultimately support the consumers of your services.

Software-Driven Everything

Multiple Clouds, Daily Feature

Instant Scale

Agile Practices.Fail Fast.

Metered Utilization and Cost

Vast Ecosystem of Tooling to Support

27 | Cloudreach.com


Ultimately, your focus should be on enabling an agile IT organization, implementing efficient governance and controls, maintaining business and technology alignment and ensuring continuous improvement.

In doing so you can react quickly to change, capturing market opportunities. You will accelerate innovation, while effectively managing risk. You will optimize cost and resources, aligning effort with business value. You will also enable sustainable differentiation and reliability.

CoreOps: Proactive Management & Break / FixYour Operations teams need to be ready to manage, optimize, and support cloud based infrastructure.

FinOps: Financial Operations & GovernanceWith the cloud being based on consumption and not upfront procurement, ensure that you maximize your ROI and understand your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in the cloud.

SecOps: Security Management & ComplianceSecurity is of course important; no one wants to get caught out. Be secure and well-governed from day one.

DevOps: Provisioning & OrchestrationEnable development and infrastructure teams to create and deploy solutions using “infrastructure as code.”

CoreOpsProactive Management & Break/Fix

Financial Operations & Governance

Provisioning & Orchestration

Security Management & Compliance

FinOps

DevOps

SecOps

CTO CISO


Head of Ops Head of Development


The core objective for the majority of enterprises adopting Cloud will be to accelerate innovation and leverage technology to take your business to the next level.

Innovation from technology

CIO CTO CISO


We have mentioned how this ‘acceleration’ is driven by the evolution of people and processes and by embracing a more agile culture, however, the vehicle for innovation is technology and the added capabilities it adds to your business.

Innovation through Cloud technology begins at the start of your Cloud journey by taking the time to assess your data, both in terms of its veracity and its potential value. Once this is understood, you can focus on how to best store and access this data on your Cloud platform.

With a modern data platform in place you can utilize serverless data analytics tools to gain powerful insights into your business. You are also in a position to leverage Machine Learning and AI tools to help identify new valuable opportunities and create responsive, personalized experiences for your customers that will help differentiate your business.


Key Takeaways4Cloud adoption is hard work - there is no magic button or shortcut. You will experience set-backs and false starts as your strategy evolves and your organization attempts to elevate its capabilities. That’s why it’s important to recognize failure will happen, to design for it and to encourage experimentation to get to the right outcome in the end.

By ensuring that you have a solid strategy is in place, you are embracing an agile, cloud-first mentality. You can mitigate challenges that come your way, learn lessons quickly and, ultimately, accelerate your cloud journey.


Hopefully this guide provides you with an indication on where to focus your time and energy as well as where you can find value as you mature in the Cloud.

1. Change the way you view your IT organizationMoving to the Cloud should trigger a seismic shift in how IT is positioned within your business. Cloud allows you to address business challenges in new ways and leverages technology to attain outcomes quickly and cost-efficiently. The Cloud places IT in the driving seat for delivering innovation and differentiation but it is a new paradigm and should be treated as such.

2. Culture is keyTo be successful, cultural change must be inclusive and transparent, with a clear direction and execution plan. Managing the cultural change that must come with transformation is vital. If you embrace a collaborative, customer-centric, agile culture, then all of your decisions regarding your people, your governance and your tooling must reinforce that.

3. Don’t underestimate the importance of governanceIf you are going to achieve a culture that enables agility and empowers innovation then you need to have the right guardrails in place. Effective cloud governance will help you retain control without hindering speed.

4. Cloud is a catalyst for change

Cloud transformation should elevate your business and enable you to respond to your market, differentiate

your business. and continuously improve how you operate.

As the leading cloud solutions provider, we’ve always done things differently.

Across our best-in-class professional and managed services, it’s our software, our application focus and our cloud culture that makes the difference.

Interested in learning how Cloudreach can help you?

Let us know.

We elevate technology and people so you can reach new heights.

Contact details:[email protected]

mailto:contact.us%40cloudreach.com%0D?subject=Contact%20Us%20-%20Cloud%20Adoption

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