By: Nilesh Gupta, Head of CloudFirst & Edge Services, 3i Infotech
We had a lot to learn around us from last two years. We became even more close to our family and friends, celebrated new heroes outside our work environments and of course ‘WFH’ became the most used abbreviated word in English for many enterprises, the impact of Covid-19 has brought the benefits and limitations of their IT landscape into the open. Some were ready to ensure there is no impact at all, but many struggled and learnt the hard way. As companies look ahead to a post-pandemic era, many will need to consider how to meet unique needs and priorities with potentially limited resources with WFH being the new norm.
In my many discussions with various stakeholders at these companies – many are still overly reliant on legacy infrastructure and business models that still needs to be addressed to ensure any kind of acceleration to cloud journey. While it is especially important, they need to develop a proactive strategy that explores the use of cloud (hybrid or multi) and how to transition away from legacy systems towards modern technologies to embrace the digital podium, it is equally important for a partner to ensure the adoption acceleration is seamless and successful in the end.
It is important to engage with a cloud lifecycle management services partner for existing and new enterprises to transform their technology to the cloud faster and without risk. Today, industry-leading automation delivers 10x acceleration with complete ease, governance, efficiency, and fine-grained control of multi-cloud environments based on customer’s business and IT ecosystem. Efficient transformational partners use their global delivery capabilities and strong partnerships with established doyens in the space such as Oracle (OCI), Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft (Azure) to deliver cloud computing services that help organizations enjoy substantial reduction in CapEx across hardware, licensing, and software. With the increased agility and flexibility offered by cloud computing services, your organization will be able to cut OpEx costs like cooling and power supply, and build affordable, tested business continuity and disaster recovery plans. A suitable service provider needs to provide a wide choice of engagement models – shared, hybrid, SLA-based, and project-based, that help organisations to experiment and innovate.
Broadly speaking there are three dimensions to cloud adoption journey:
- Discover
- Migrate
- Manage
1. Discover the Apps & IT Infrastructure: In this phase, there is a 360O analysis of the infrastructure and application to map the dependencies and existing workload performance. We will need to ensure there is full hierarchical view of the application and its dependencies that will help ease easy migration, asset management, and any compliance needs. So, answers to some of the typical questions like below will be addressed during the deep discovery phase:
- What services are you planning to move into the cloud?
- What are your reasons for moving to the cloud?
- Do you have a cloud strategy and how does it define your cloud plans?
- Are there agreed business owners for each service and a sponsor for the migration?
- What are the dependencies of application on other and how are they connected?
It is in this phase that as a partner with a single comprehensive cloud management platform will help build a roadmap for the readiness, prepare an automated discovery plan for the business environment, create a set of cloud transformation sprints, and then formulate the structured road map to address the subsequent sprints to comprehend what should be considered for cloud transformation.
2. Accelerate Cloud Migration: Typically, in cloud migration phase, it is known to be fraught with complications and tedious tasks. The objective is to facilitate a seamless migration of the existing on-prem workloads to hybrid or multi-cloud environments with an aim to provide uninterrupted services to end-users. Be it migration of monolithic applications into a hosted cloud environment or housing them in containers, the virtual resources need to be available in minutes as well as manage deployments across multiple cloud-providers such as public, private and hybrid at the same time.
It is in this phase, the transformational partner, with a 360O overview of the application, and the cloud management platform, identifies the required virtual infrastructure (OS, supporting software, servers, network) and get the target cloud environment ready. This simple step accelerates the migration and achieves faster time-to-market and optimised cost to migrate.
3. Continuous Optimization and Management: One major concern post cloud adoption is to accommodate for high availability of the applications round the clock. What is needed is to have a full-stack visibility across the required platforms by factoring in unforeseen demands and failure scenarios. Multi-cloud application monitoring is rendered in a detailed and effective method by gathering cloud-specific insights. Artificial Intelligence for IT operations is the critical change in basic assumptions that is required to manage these digital transformation issues.
While ensuring round the clock availability of cloud environment, it is equally important to optimize cloud costs. One needs to ensure the reporting of cloud usage at the application and services level, dynamic scaling up and down of cloud resources, and intelligent rebalancing of workloads are available on real time basis. It helps you stay ahead of the cloud expenses by providing comprehensive chargeback / reports on resource consumption and enables to cut costs by making recommendations based on the actual usage. Be it public, hybrid or multi-cloud, periodic analysis of cloud usage and associated costs needs to be conducted to prevent overspending.
It is important to note that a comprehensive single cloud management platform helps customers broadly in these three dimensions and in accelerating the cloud adoption journey seamlessly.
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