Willie Schoeman | Managing Director | Technology | Cloud First Lead | Accenture Africa | mail me |
Managing a cloud estate can be a culture shock. The traditional operating mode centred around buying, running and decommissioning physical hardware over multi-year cycles is replaced by a need to continuously manage and optimise capacity, consumption, cost, performance, and business innovation.
Continuous optimisation is necessary because constant change is one of the defining qualities of the cloud. But the pace of change is extraordinary, unlike anything seen in traditional IT, so established ‘change management’ approaches simply can’t keep up. That’s why the cloud needs a very different way of working.
We call this the need to ‘Run Different‘. It’s about shifting to the agile ways of working that will maximise your cost efficiency, enhance your IT performance and deliver on the vast innovation potential of the cloud.
Optimise for operations
Just because you’re in the cloud doesn’t mean the need to manage your IT somehow goes away. Whatever type of cloud environment you opt for will still need to be managed well if it is to deliver value for the business. And that, ultimately, is your responsibility, not the cloud provider.
The exceptional pace of the cloud undeniably brings some additional complexity. A cloud operating model needs agility, scalability, and ease of use, enabling the rapid adoption of new cloud releases and services. At the same time, you still need people who understand the infrastructure and can handle the basics like patching, security hardening, backups, and updates.
A cloud operating model needs to be focused on optimising the cloud estate. That means optimising the consumption and, by extension, the cost of workloads. But to truly maximise the value on offer, the enterprise also needs to optimise for application performance and business innovation.
So, you need to ensure you’re leveraging the right mix of cloud services to maximise application performance and onboarding innovative new capabilities as they’re released to the market. It also means ensuring you’re making the most of your data, using cloud services to get new levels of insight.
Optimise for innovation
The innovation potential of the cloud can transform your IT organisation’s way of working from a reactive approach – receiving and responding to requests from the business – to something much more proactive and forward-thinking.
When it can track, assess and understand the torrent of new hyperscaler services and capabilities, IT isn’t only better able to optimise the cloud estate, it can also push innovation towards the business as an active participant in the company’s growth plan.
However, the rate of change and the sheer volume of new releases means discerning the signal from the noise is a real challenge. There simply isn’t time to kick the tires on every new release, evaluate its innovation potential and assess its suitability for your business. There are few organisations worldwide with enough resources to do that systematically.
A Cloud Centre of Excellence (CoE) can significantly accelerate cloud adoption and value. By bringing together technical and business expertise, the COE brings central governance and direction to cloud decision-making and optimising for innovation. The CoE can play a crucial ‘marketing’ function in pushing the enterprise innovation agenda forward.
With a small and dedicated team of architects monitoring and assessing the potential of each cloud release, the enterprise is better placed to stay on top of the multitude of new cloud services. However, the CoE must be grounded in the day-to-day realities and challenges that application teams face and don’t fall into the trap of becoming an ‘ivory tower’ disconnected from the real needs of the business.
Optimise for adoption
For most organisations, cloud infrastructure is only one part of the technology estate.
Many other related components need to be managed and optimised alongside, including:
- Data. The sheer amount of data enterprises end up with in the cloud creates what’s known as ‘data gravity’. Put simply, when your data gets too big, you can’t just pick it up and move it someplace else. So, cloud data management needs to consider factors like bringing computing to the data or creating smart extracts that can be moved more quickly.
- Edge. As more and more computing is pushed from the cloud to minimise latency and maximise performance at the network edge, enterprises need to consider how to manage the interplay of the two and where the data fits in.
- Networking. It is an area where cloud providers are rapidly expanding their services. Each has dozens of network services, including routing, switching, and more.
- Machine learning. Enterprises can now benefit from numerous ready-made machine learning services from cloud providers, providing advanced insights into customer segmentation, supply chain optimisation, and more.
Time to ‘run different’ in the cloud
The acceleration of the cloud needs to be managed effectively to deliver value. The pace of change is such that you can’t wait for the end of your five-year hardware lifecycles or managed services contracts to reconfigure how you operate. Optimisation and intelligent cloud management must happen all the time and start now.
Many companies work with third parties for their cloud management and optimisation needs. These organisations have the scale to keep up with the vast range of new cloud services released monthly. They also possess the expertise to slipstream the releases into the enterprise estate with minimal disruption. Our research shows that 48% of those using third-party managed services ‘to a great degree’ report achieving the full benefits of the cloud (compared with just 35% of those that don’t).
The key message? Build optimisation, innovation, and the adoption of new cloud capabilities into your day-to-day run operations. That’s the major paradigm shift of running differently in the cloud.
