This is the start of a 5 post series that explores the journey from on-premise owned technology to service based cloud and serverless.
Note: These articles will be collated into a single e-book (with added content) at the end of the series. If you’d like a copy, please get in touch.
The Journey to the Cloud
The journey from ‘I own all of my information technology (IT) hardware and software’ to ‘I rent technology services only when my customers access my services, paying only for what I need and use’ can be both a scary journey at the beginning. But it is also an exciting disruptive transformation that allows you to disrupt your business internally, and remake and revitalise your business, your purpose, and customer outcomes. I cannot overstate how important this can be to any business in any industry.
If you don’t disrupt internally, your competitors will disrupt you externally.
Digital transformation is about digitally enabling both your customers and your internal business processes - this is both costly and time consuming. If you own and manage all of your own IT hardware and software, your inherent costs to change may make a digital transformation either too costly to attempt or so time-consuming that the business cannot wait for it. These drivers often hold business agility hostage and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) stops all transformation.
The key focus is that as a company, we don’t want to turn the lights on unless we have customers. We also want to be able to change and adapt without large expenditures of time and money to try new things.
This means we need to move away from owning all of our own technology, and towards using Cloud technology services when and where we need them. This allows us to be flexible and responsive while investing where it makes most sense - customer outcomes.
This truly is a journey - it will not be just about turning everything we own off and throwing it away one day and then being on Cloud the next. There are stages that we will have to go through on the journey. They will be positively disruptive and transformative but some hard choices will need to be made along the journey.
So what does this journey look like?
Maturity Assessment
You can not understand how to get where you are going without understanding where you are. This is both a technology/culture and management/procurement assessment.
Enterprise architecture – technology and business process roadmap.
Virtualisation of current IT systems and processes - this will be a cost savings step but in itself will only provide limited transformation.
Move to unmanaged Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - where appropriate, and the retiring of less-used and unused systems and services. This will not save money but will allow the business to change and adapt faster.
Move to Platform as a Service (PaaS) and managed IaaS - the development of Cloud foundations and practices that move the business away from managing commodity technology to utilising services.
Move to serverless - truly transformed where the business focuses on developing the business processes into applications that provide customer outcomes and digitise how the business works.
Maturity assessments take many forms. In this case, we are referring to the level of maturity to be able to take advantage of ‘as a Service’ offerings.
Key aspects to look for in a maturity assessment
IT process maturity - the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework provides an excellent benchmark
Life cycle management of hardware and software - for the existing enterprise including Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Current state of the business and enterprise architecture. In other words, do you know how your business operates and can you explain it?
It is recommended a self assessment is followed up either by a professional assessment of the maturity of the organization or the development of an internal project to do a full maturity assessment. It will identify areas of concern and shortcomings that will need to be addressed to take true advantage of the move of IT services. If the goal is to move to Cloud, then a ‘Cloud Centre of Excellence’ would be recommended to do this maturity assessment.
Enterprise architecture, or lack thereof
Do not let an enterprise architecture, or the lack thereof, derail the transformation process. Use this as an opportunity to map the organizations business outcomes and roadmap to the current and proposed technology. The development of a technology roadmap and an enterprise architecture will help the transformation process and result in a more planned outcome. This is not the legacy monolithic enterprise architecture that can result in a multi-year program and a 700 page report. This is a framework of service blocks aligned to the business outcomes that can be used to develop a plan to transform.
The ‘Cloud Centre of Excellence’ should own the delivery, if not the development, of the enterprise architecture and Cloud/technology roadmap. These artefacts will provide the measuring stick to assess against.
Out of the maturity assessment we will have identified all of our current IT hardware and software. How much is already virtualised? What is virtualised? Who is using it and for what?
Using the maturity assessment we can start setting goals for when and where we want to use services.
Quick definitions to help us understand what our options are
What is Unmanaged IaaS?
Today the market is all about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) but there is a grey area that requires clarification. In New Zealand, the Cloud Providers and all of the government IaaS providers offer unmanaged IaaS. This means the client is responsible for the operating system (OS), Windows or Linux, and the Provider is only responsible for the hardware.
This can be a significantly distinguishing factor for both cost and service availability because a customer that breaks their server OS with a change and has no Service Level Agreement with a support provider must suffer both the productivity lost, time to fix the issue, and the maintenance cost to fix the issue.
What is PAAS?
PaaS by contrast is not a managed OS but instead an application platform such as a web server or a Database Platform as a Service (dbPaaS). With a PaaS offering, the Provider is responsible for the hardware, server OS, and application providing the platform. The customer can only configure the ‘Platform’ application and cannot install custom applications on the server.
This leaves the ‘grey’ area between unmanaged IaaS and PaaS, referred to as managed IaaS.
What is managed Iaas?
In a managed IaaS offering the Provider is responsible for the hardware and OS, including patching, and has SLAs for the availability of the server at the OS level. The customer has enough administrative rights to install and configure applications on the server, create custom configurations to applications on the OS, and even install custom applications on the server.
What is serverless IaaS?
Today Cloud Providers offer the ability to run custom code on a Provider Server where the Provider provides a cost and SLA for processing the code. The customer is only responsible for developing the code and what functions it performs - the Provider is responsible for all hardware, OS, and applications that run the code. This is considered serverless Infrastructure as a Service because the customer only pays for the processor time that the code consumes.
There are many good examples of serverless IaaS but let us look at a simple one:
Customer X has a Java snippet of code that listens at a webpage URL for someone to access the webpage, when someone accesses the page the code launches to provide data that is stored on Cloud Storage, another service. The customer only pays for the processor time the code uses when the webpage is accessed and the storage used by the data, plus depending on the provider the bandwidth used. The Provider is responsible for everything else.
If your company’s strength and expertise is selling, making, or distributing anything but technology, why do you need to spend money on, and focus so much talent on, technology instead of outcomes?
Do you manage the power generation for the energy your company uses? You are not an energy company so all you do is manage the energy contract as a utility based on your consumption and contracted SLA. Technology should be treated as a utility in the same manner.
To get this benefit we MUST take the journey from internal hosted/owned IT through IaaS and as much as possible to serverless infrastructure and cloud utility services. This allows agility, changes the IT funding structure to OpEx, and allows for the treatment of IT as a utility. There are drawbacks and this move has both availability and security aspects that need to be explored and validated. But done correctly, this can provide a dramatically positive internal disruption and digital transformation to a business.
To go deeper and more technical please follow us to the next article ‘Prerequisites for Moving to As A Service’
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