Article by: Marianne Calder, VP & MD EMEA, Puppet
2018 is the year that cloud will become the key delivery engine for the CIO’s main priorities, including digital transformation. Over 50% of European enterprises now use public cloud in some capacity, according to Forrester, which leaves a significant number who have still yet to do so. However, in 2018, the CIO’s cloud strategy will shift from cost efficiency to business enablement, bolstered by trust and new ways to create customer-centric services. Broadening adoption of the public cloud will be a key resource in delivering this.
Weighing up the risks and benefits
Previously, businesses (and CIOs in particular) have remained wary of wide-reaching public cloud adoption, with concerns around security, privacy and the spectre of vendor lock-in. However, as public cloud providers begin to offer more services and take steps to address these concerns, these may increasingly be ‘the result of old-fashioned thinking, misrepresentation or conservatism’, as a recent Forrester report has proposed. While the risks may be real and are certainly worth due consideration, the benefits of the public cloud are growing and CIOs need to take note to ensure that their business is not missing out on creating and delivering the best customer-centric technologies to achieve digital transformation.
One of the key concerns that floats around the public cloud provider space is portability, meaning the risk that if you put your data into the cloud with one provider, you won’t be able to get it back to move to another. Certainly, there can be friction between different platforms, but with dedicated technologies helping you bridge between one provider and another, these concerns reduce down to simply finding a successful way to manage any transitions. As a result, organisations should not hear ‘vendor lock-in’ and be frightened into inaction, missing out on the many benefits.
This is particularly important as many enterprises are already using a multi-cloud environment, although sometimes unwittingly. Many service providers – like Salesforce – utilise public cloud for their applications and CIOs can only achieve a clear overview of the services in use by incorporating these into a wider cloud strategy including public cloud.
Avoiding the public cloud is often an attempt by organisations to feel in control of their data; by keeping it in private clouds or on-premises, they feel a natural security in knowing where their data is at any one time. With regulations like GDPR coming into force, it is only natural that organisations will continue to use these solutions to maintain autonomy of their data.
However, avoiding the public cloud entirely in the interests of maintaining control of your data is, at best, short-sighted and at worst, detrimental for enterprises. As public cloud providers increase their data centre footprint, with local data centres in each region, businesses can increasingly still keep their data close to home. At the same time, with the many challenges that GDPR brings in terms of changing the attitudes to personal data within an organisation, public clouds could actually alleviate some of the challenges. As businesses look to win over customer trust with responsible data usage, Forrester predicts that, “boards and investors will increasingly demand trustworthiness metrics in performance reporting,” which will require increased oversight of a business’s data landscape. With a respectable public cloud provider and the correct public cloud monitoring tools, businesses using the public cloud are able to demonstrate that they are keeping their customer data safe by showing exactly where it is and what is happening to it.
A key aspect of this is the public cloud’s ability to deploy discovery technology. By modelling workloads to map which resources they use, discovery technology can help track where a business is pulling its data from. This transparency allows organisations to trust that they truly know which personal data they have and how they are using it, as well as ensuring they are maximising the potential value of any data by using it in the most effective way possible.
The good news is that public cloud adoption is relatively straightforward. A useful resource is the Gartner Cloud Adoption Framework, which lays out a six-stage approach to cloud deployment and management:
1. Build skills and assess applications (again, discovery technology can be of use here)
2. Select cloud providers and services
3. Architect cloud services and mitigate risks
4. Estimate the bill and establish governance
5. Provision and automate cloud services
6. Operate cloud environments at scale
With deployment safely underway, IT professionals can refocus on the real advantages of the public cloud and how it can help them achieve their objectives. In the first instance, as public cloud providers expand their offerings with new services, businesses can add additional capabilities to help them better serve their customers without the hassle of setting up additional providers and integrating them into the existing infrastructure.
Public cloud DevOps
Secondly, as organisations embrace DevOps to enable their business transformation, their focus is on delivering targeted solutions for specific and real problems. As the cloud encourages an agile and scalable way of thinking, the public cloud becomes the ideal conduit for taking a DevOps initiative and deploying it at scale.
As public cloud providers deploy IaaS and PaaS offerings, organisations face less burdens in terms of the operations of running software. This frees up more capacity for software delivery rather than management, as organisations pivot to look on the future of the business, rather than firefighting its current systems.
At the same time, the move to the public cloud is offering organisations an opportunity to rethink their software delivery strategy – especially when it comes to step five in the Gartner process, automation. Cloud technology helps align the development and operations teams with a range of services to aid in the automation of this, such as APIs for provisioning and managing resources. This enables organisations to deliver applications quickly, at a lower cost and with fewer roadblocks along the way due to delivery or operation bottlenecks.
As part of a hybrid cloud structure, the public cloud is an unmatchable resource for helping organisations deliver on the promise of customer-centricity while avoiding many of the challenges that often crop up along the DevOps lifecycle. No doubt, this is part of the reason that some of those 50% of Forrester’s enterprise respondents have adopted at least some public cloud platform. However, that leaves a significant number of businesses as yet not experiencing the advantages, who still stand to gain from the benefits of public cloud infrastructure. By revisiting assumptions about the cloud and how they internally deliver software, businesses stand to benefit from cost-efficient, agile, scalable cloud services, which they can both trust and use to deliver the solutions their customers deserve, whatever these may be.
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