At the core of businesses IT strategies today sits a familiar and fundamental building block: the cloud. IDC predicts that by 2021, over 65% of enterprises in Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) will use multiple cloud services and platforms, giving rise to multi and hybrid cloud environments.
Cloud has offered major opportunities to organisations by breaking down traditional boundaries between teams and bringing new agility. However, this also means that companies will need to modernize to truly benefit from cloud adoption.
Failure to do so might result in a storm, whereby they will face unexpected complexities that they may not be equipped to navigate. So, what are some of these challenges and how can businesses prevent or overcome them?
The struggle for talent
Organisations will need to break away from past practices such as the waterfall software development methodology to truly benefit from cloud adoption. The challenge here is the lack of tech talents with the skills needed to support such new ways of work.
Case in point: Recruitment consultancy Robert Walters found that close to 70% of hiring managers in South-east Asia took at least three months to fill an open tech position.
Recognising this, Asian government and businesses alike have taken steps to plug the skills gap. The Singapore government, for instance, is offering more financial support to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) for employee training. As of July 1, 2019, SMEs in Singapore can use the Productivity Solutions Grant (SkillsFuture Training Subsidy) to cover 70% of out-of-pocket training expenses, capped at S$10,000 for each firm.
Some companies have also partnered educational institutions to do their part to help solve the skills gap issue. This is exemplified in the case of the partnership between Alibaba Cloud and Singapore Management University (SMU), whereby they jointly launched a series of courses to upskill more than 1,000 working professionals in Singapore in the areas of emerging technologies such as cloud computing.
Although it is important to close the skills gap, having cloud-certified IT staff does not guarantee success within the cloud. Those IT employees also need to also have strong practical skills (such as troubleshooting cloud issues) or hands-on experience managing the cloud.
In addition, they should be knowledgeable and skilled at managing a variety of cloud since enterprises are increasingly using multiple cloud platforms instead of a single cloud. Without these knowledge and skills, enterprises will find it challenging to fully harness the value of multi-cloud.
Other factors that can lead to a storm
Besides talent crunch, the following factors
may also cause cloud adoption to introduce complications instead of benefits to
an organisation:
Poor
understanding of the cloud consumption model
Businesses that are stuck in their old ways of procuring IT and managing
traditional infrastructures might end up with huge unexpected bills when they
start adopting the cloud. Unlike traditional infrastructures where organisations
can easily control the usage of resources as they are limited by the available
capacity, public clouds do not have similar limitations.
The pay-per-use model is a double-edged sword as businesses will have to pay for resources they consumed even if it was in error, such as forgetting to shut down unused instances.
To prevent bill shock, organisations should begin with the right design principles and frameworks (process and technology) and apply appropriate limits for projects with budget limitations. They should also leverage tools and use cloud cost controls offered by their public cloud service vendors to estimate and limit their costs.
Not having the
right foundation
Many companies underestimate the
complexity of cloud and rush their cloud adoptions without considering design
and best practices in detail. This may cause an issue later on. When cloud
adoption spreads across the organisation and its complexity increases, it will
become challenging to manage the IT infrastructure.
Moreover, the absence of the right foundation might cause issues when businesses try to integrate existing complex applications and infrastructure with the latest technologies or migrate those apps to the cloud.
Organisations can avoid facing such a situation by designing the cloud architecture with appropriate principles and frameworks from the start. They should also deploy the right monitoring tools to gain visibility into and control over their cloud.
Overlooking
security and compliance
Although cloud service providers can and
will secure their infrastructure, organisations are still responsible for their
own end-to-end security. As such, businesses need to ensure that their IT team
has a broader understanding of the security risks that the cloud could bring
and are equipped with the right capabilities to address those risks.
They should also design their cloud architecture with security and compliance in mind, conduct third-party audits, and adopt robust security practices.
Assuming
post-migration management will happen on its own
Many companies assume that once
applications are in the cloud, they will take care of themselves. However, this
is not the case – apps that migrate to the cloud do not automatically gain
self-management capabilities. Organisations, therefore, need an operations team
for cloud systems just as they do for on-premises systems.
All these factors, coupled with a lack of confidence in exactly how to adopt the right cloud strategy, can create some real storms.
Partnering to avoid the storm
A strategic partner can help companies effectively navigate through the maze of confusing and conflicting cloud platform claims and value propositions. Having such a capability will enable organisations to accelerate the value of the cloud and seize opportunities to become a digital business faster and with less risks.
All in all, the journey to a multi-cloud environment is challenging. Organisations, therefore, need the confidence to know they are getting the maximum value from their cloud investments and minimizing risks while accelerating their transformation.
Managed service providers (MSPs) can help provide the expertise and tools that businesses need to accelerate the value of cloud at every point along their cloud/digital transformation journey while ensuring security and compliance. As such, organisations that leverage MSPs no longer have to fear getting caught in a storm unprepared.
