When asked if customers can customise the Model T, Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motors, is quoted as saying “you can have any colour you want, as long as it is black” – it was a reflection of the limits of industrialization of the time – that compromises had to be made in the name of efficiency and quality (aka consumerization).
“Not only was it black, there was only one model,” noted Claudio De Rold, chief of Research, IT Services and Sourcing, vice president & distinguished analyst, Gartner, speaking on the topic of Cloud Sourcing Strategies, Risks and Best Practices.
He was describing the journey that IT is taking – from industrialisation to consumerisation. “We are trying to implement front-end consumerization in the relationship with our customers before industrialization can make the it’s really strong, and that’s risky,” he cautioned.
Transposing it to our time today, the CIO and IT are being asked to accelerate cloud adoption – private, public, hybrid and multi-cloud – as part of the need for businesses to remain agile in response to the constraints introduced by COVID-19.
The year of multi-cloud
IDC predicts that by 2022 over 90% of enterprises globally will rely on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs. It also predicts that in 2021 majority of enterprises will deploy combinations of on-premises, off-premises, public, and private clouds as their default environments. In effect IDC labels 2021 the year of multi-cloud.
IDC‘s Jyoti Lalchandani, group vice president & regional managing director for the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (META), says the widespread disruption caused by the global COVID-19 outbreak has reinforced the critical importance of businesses being agile enough to scale up or down with fluctuations in demand.
“A public cloud platform provides enterprises with an agile, scalable, and cost-effective IT infrastructure that supports their business processes. However, public cloud is not necessarily an appropriate option for all types of workloads. As such, some enterprises are choosing to keep certain workloads on-premises – using an in-house datacentre – or on private clouds. This approach helps them achieve better performance, 24/7 availability, enhanced security, and greater compliance with regulations, ” he adds.
Barriers to multi-cloud
While uptake of multi-cloud architecture has started to gain momentum, not all businesses are sufficiently prepared to implement cloud roadmaps due to migration and skills-related challenges.
“Just under 30% of medium-to-large organizations responding to IDC’s META CIO Survey 2020 highlighted migration as a key challenge,” says Lalchandani.
At roundtable discussions moderated by FutureCIO the issue of public cloud adoption is no longer in question. Concerned about cloud vendor lock-in, enterprises are looking at multi-cloud as a viable option. Those in early stages of investigation are discovering that different vendors are implementing cloud solutions differently and that running a multi-cloud strategy is not as easy as vendors paint it to be.
Multi-cloud: enter with eyes wide open
Sandeep Bhargava, managing director APJ at Rackspace acknowledges that while multi-cloud can often be the first step towards a comprehensive digital transformation, the process of switching from single to multi-cloud can be fairly straightforward, as long as there is a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of the environment, the level of automation that exists and the amount of data to be transferred.
Charlie Dai, principal analyst, Forrester, cautioned that technology practitioners must be able to realize unified orchestration of full-stack services from IaaS to PaaS and SaaS across multi-cloud environments, ensuring SLAs in the meantime.
“They also need to deal with the difficulty of application migration, data management and service governance across public cloud and private deployment on-premises, as well as the effective management of emerging technologies, such as AI, big data and IoT,” he added.
To which Bhargava suggested that IT have a fundamental understanding of the application strategy and enterprise architecture when making decisions about placement.
“It’s important to understand the access required, who needs that access? (i.e. applications, people, partners) and what type of access (i.e. API, user login, scheduled task) as well as frequency, retention periods and the size of associated data. Technical currency – asking is the application compatible with the target tech – will also play a large part,” he added.
Bringing order into chaos
One of the challenges faced by IT in the digital transformation of the enterprise is the authority given to lines of business to pursue their version of transformation using their technology of choice. This has led to the proliferation of shadow IT – many of which are cloud-based, delivered as a service.
This not only negates one of the early claimed benefits of cloud computing – reducing the cost of compute resources – but also introduced complexity and contention across the enterprise.
Forrester’s Dai believes technology decision-makers should have a holistic view on the business and technology requirements when they define hybrid cloud strategy.
“In addition to the regulatory compliance on the data ownership and privacy, they should also consider the needs of elasticity, the cost of provisioning emerging technologies, the data gravity, the application performance expected vs. the connectivity, the needs for back-up and disaster recovery, the skillsets of their IT arm,” he added.
For organisations that are already deep into cloud, CenturyLink Asia Pacific’s director, Product Management (Hybrid Cloud & IT Solutions), Ignatius Wong suggests using a multi-cloud management tool to manage the various cloud types under a single console, bringing some sense of order in the chaos.
“With a unified view, staff can more easily manage and monitor workloads, applications and stored data regardless of where they reside,” he added. “No matter how many cloud services, it is vital to have a full complement of capabilities and processes that support your company’s security and compliance protocols. Here, it is important to implement consistent policy-based controls across the multiple cloud services you deploy.”
Agility in lockdown
With enterprises reeling from government driven lockdown directives, business leaders are pushing to accelerate transformation by leveraging technology starting with the cloud. But how does IT, or anyone for that matter, execute such an all-encompassing strategy given the constraints of social distancing and lockdown?
Forrester’s Dai cautioned not to see multi-cloud as the goal of cloud transformation.
“If existing IT architecture could fulfil business needs today and for foreseeable future, there is no need to go to multi-cloud just to be multi-cloud,” he commented. “As the COVID-19 pandemic is still spreading and global economy is slowing down, it’s very critical to spend the money wisely. Second, decision-makers should start with in-depth analysis of business pain points as well as future opportunities that could drive exponential business growth. Mapping them with the advantages and limitations of different cloud offerings to find the right solution. In most cases remote maintenance and automation features will help in such situation.”
Rackspace’s Bhargava suggests that businesses begin by revisiting their cloud strategy and realigning it with both short/long term objectives. “In parallel, they can begin by migrating non-essential services – accelerating value realisation with cost savings and validating migration methodologies that work within their estate,” he added.
He opined that the use of a multi-cloud strategy can improve an organisation’s position by providing fit-for-purpose levels of protection and security instead of the one size fits all approach. “This ensures that all of your data is protected without waste or regret expenditure,” concluded Bhargava.
