What Does Your Long-Term Cloud Strategy Look Like?

Many organizations adopt a cloud service to meet a pressing business need. That can be anything, from simple services like email or storage, to compute resources to run business applications, all the way up to full ERP suites. This is often followed by various departments adopting more services to meet their needs, creating a mess of resources and overlapping services that can do more harm to the business than good. These additional services can add to the security risks, complexity, and challenge of managing a company’s cloud footprint which, coupled with COVID-19 and the rush to adopt various cloud services created significant issues.

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Looking long term at cloud

Taking stock of the situation, all businesses need a cloud strategy that is focused on meeting business needs, and not adopting attractive new features for the sake of it. Finding out what your business needs from the cloud requires a thorough examination of every office and department, what they need today, and their requirements in years to come.

Inspect the current situation and create a map of what applications are used (and by whom) and see where any rationalization can take place. Ensure security is consistent across applications and that, if the business creates its own apps or service, they produce information and assets compatible with other cloud services.

Data also needs to be compatible and accessible across applications, avoiding creating silos and the risk of teams creating multiple sets of similar data. Having a single version of the truth is key for leadership and the analytics that big data provides across supply chain, manufacturing, back office, and customers.

Cloud presents a different proposition to traditional software, with most providers delivering a regular cadence of updates and new features. Businesses need to be more aware of what’s on the roadmap for any service they use and be prepared to adopt those that benefit the business. This may require plenty of pilots and trials running across the organization to assess the potential of innovations like machine learning, green computing, and even quantum resources.

How cloud works for you

A cloud-first strategy is the way most companies are looking to go when it comes to their next IT steps. Whether public, hybrid, or multi-cloud, IT teams need to migrate their existing on-premises services to their chosen cloud provider, or look to bring a range of cloud services together to function as an efficient unit.

With the global growth in cloud adoption, there are many examples to follow in terms of success stories, but each strategy must be unique to your company’s needs. The focus should be on a long-term effort, rolling out the easy wins to the cloud such as productivity or back-office tools first, with tools that deliver a competitive advantage close behind.

The more complex challenges, such as applications with siloed data, legacy and custom applications, will take longer and require more effort to move to the cloud. But by building up a groundswell of company knowledge and culture around their cloud applications, confidence in using them and seeing results, companies can quickly see the positives and focus on future improvements and better delivery from their cloud tools.

But as the cloud continues to evolve with new features, collaborative services and by its nature encourages users to adopt new technology, the need for business to stay on top of cloud developments increases.

CIOs need to choose the right cloud solutions, optimize these tools to deliver maximum benefit for their business, and prepare for a world where they need to be able to:

Work in a faster-paced business environment
Increase agility for processes and operations
Deliver new products or services with a faster time-to-market
Collaborate with partners to work better together
Be able to cope with massive fluctuations and challenges

While adopting cloud has clear benefits, businesses need to keep in mind the risks of vendor lock-in and security challenges and to keep options for a changing cloud environment. For instance, many businesses will be familiar with the upcoming metaverse, but no one truly knows how it will impact operations for whole industries or markets. Whatever form it takes, the metaverse will be delivered by cloud, and companies will need to be ready.

Avoiding cloud barriers

Many businesses are still concerned about the cost of moving to the cloud. While some in leadership worry about costs at the start of the migration, the long-term nature of cloud subscriptions and usage billing make the cost acceptable as part of any long-term strategy.

And, when the cloud is up and running, businesses can optimize their cloud better than legacy software by adding or removing users, boosting usage, or retiring unused applications as part of the service offering.

Leaders are also concerned about losing control of their cloud, the risk of hacking, or what happens if a cloud provider fails. The reality is that there are services across the wider cloud that can deal with these issues, and businesses should be prepared through business continuity plans to adopt them or address any situation.

Whatever those worries, the benefits of the cloud are massively proven and clear to most businesses. Setting out a use case where the benefits are provable is the job of any migration team, led by the CIO and backed by the business. Getting the whole company on board and in support of the long-term goals will set your business up to see and benefit from the true value of the cloud.

Legacy is legacy, wherever you put it

The key to a successful cloud project is realizing that merely lifting and shifting your legacy data from one place to another is not the answer - it remains a legacy application, whether it’s in your own data center or a data center in the cloud.

The early cloud adopters realized this the hard way. Without an investment in modernizing their applications and simply moving them as is into public cloud services, they didn’t see any of the benefits of cloud-native characteristics, such as autoscaling, self-protection, or multiple redundancy zones. To reap all those cloud-native benefits, organizations need to identify which applications would be good candidates to invest in for modernizing.

Everyone understands that the application landscape is often the heart of the business, as it drives revenue and improves end user and customer experience. So, selecting an application to invest in, whether it‘s a simple migration or a complete rewrite, is not a decision to be taken lightly as it’s an expensive endeavor. Hitachi Vantara can help you make those decisions: We help you select the applications to modernize to get the best out of the cloud program in terms of the fastest return on that investment.