“Over the past decade, two major trends have emerged concurrently,” said Five Keys To Innovating Faster With Cloud, a recent report by Forrester Research. “First, there has been a growing need for rapid innovation and adaptivity as businesses respond to customer-driven trends. At the same time, cloud platforms have advanced rapidly in their capabilities and ease of deployment. Leveraging cloud has become the fastest way to modernize your tech stack and deliver the innovation and adaptivity needed in a customer-obsessed strategy.”
Cloud emerged in the late 2000s as a new model of computing, - the third in the history of the IT industry after the mainframe-based centralized computing and the PC-based client-server models. The internet is the defining technology of the cloud model.
Cloud has gone through three major stages over the past fifteen years. First came infrastructure-as-a-service, offering near unlimited scalability at very attractive prices. Then came software-as-a-service, offering a faster and less costly way of prototyping and deploying innovative applications with advanced tools like containers, Kubernetes, and microservices. Cloud computing has now entered the third stage, - a major engine of business transformation that’s helping companies adapt to the digitalization of the economy, - a digitalization which has significantly accelerated since the advent of Covid-19 in March of 2020.
The report cites the top reasons given by company decision-makers for embracing cloud computing: ability to scale quickly and easily (41%); expertly managed services from cloud service providers (40%); ability to deploy internal IT staff for other tasks (37%); fastest time to deployment (36%); and a focus on business priorities rather than infrastructure (30%).
“Maturity matters in building your cloud strategy,” notes the report. A successful cloud strategy needs to align with the organization’s maturity level, to make sure that the company doesn’t bite more than it can chew. “While some organizations are very advanced in their use of cloud, many enterprises are still early in their cloud journey.”
This is not surprising. As we’ve learned over the past two centuries, there’s generally been a significant time lag between the adoption of major new transformative technologies by leading edge organizations and their broad deployment by companies and industries across the economy. Transformative technologies require major complementary investments, - such as business process redesign, the co-invention of new products and business models, and the re-skilling of the workforce, - before they can be widely embraced.
For example, over the past decade, leading universities and firms have developed impressive AI applications that have already matched or surpassed human levels of performance in a number of areas, including image and speech recognition, skin cancer classification and breast cancer detection, and defeating human champions in highly complex games like Jeopardy and Go. But, a recently published study by Accenture on the state of AI in the marketplace, found that only 12% of firms qualify as having the required AI maturity to achieve superior growth and business transformation, while the vast majority of organizations still have relatively low levels of AI maturity.
The report lists five key points that every organization should keep in mind to assist them in developing their enterprise-wide cloud strategy.
Your cloud strategy must align to your business vision and context. “If you want to use cloud successfully, put every cloud decision up against your business strategy regardless of your maturity level.” In other words, develop a cohesive, enterprise-wide cloud strategy based on its overall business value to the organization, instead of building a cloud plan in pieces.
Cloud-native is a way of working, not just a set of technologies. Companies should view the move to cloud as an excellent opportunity to adopt cloud-native attributes and ways of working to realize major improvements in agility, resilience, automation, and productivity. “Ultimately, the primary challenges to a successful cloud strategy are cultural, not technical, in nature. Cloud-native technologies will add little value if the practices and systems around them are not modernized. This applies to architectures, processes, governance, skills, financing, and licensing.”
Governance is a conversation between the governed and the governors. “Even after many years of cloud adoption, governance remains a fairly new concept, as organizations have focused more on the speed and flexibility cloud delivers. … Work collectively with your vendors, business units, developers, and customers to build a shared governance model that facilitates, rather than impedes, innovation and productivity.”
Cloud isn’t always the right answer. “Defaulting to the cloud as the first thought disregards the unique strengths that other computing platforms have to offer. … The simplicity gained by standardizing on cloud for everything can result in customer experience loss, performance issues, compliance violations, escalated costs, latency, or supplier concentration risks.”
If you’re adding complexity, it has to have business value. “One of the benefits of cloud is that it provides many options. One of its risks is that it can quickly become very complex. If you’re opting for a more complex cloud model, be clear about the business value that complexity delivers.”
In addition, the Forrester report includes a Cloud Strategy Fundamentals Model to help guide firms along their cloud journey. The Model comprises four key points:
There’s a new taxonomy for cloud platforms. In its early years, cloud was primarily viewed as xxx-as-a-service over the internet, in particular, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). In Forrester’s opinion, this taxonomy is does not accurately describe the cloud service available today. Instead, cloud today offers services in a wide variety of areas, including application development, database and analytics, security, management, and consulting.
I have long viewed cloud computing as The Internet of Services, offering all kinds of services-as-a-service, including consumer services, business services, government services, financial services, health-care services, educational services and so on.
Cloud practices modernize development. While cloud is rooted in technology, achieving its full benefits requires implementing the right practices to modernize the culture and processes of the organization. “To modernize practices, start by looking at the scope of systems (engagement, insights, record, and innovation); fundamental use cases (build, migrate, modernize, and buy/customize); and governance plans (security, management, operations, architecture, and skills).”
Cloud partners accelerate your path. As has long been the case in manufacturing, a successful cloud economy requires organizing a supply chain of services, that is, reaching out to the right assortment of partners for many of the services once done in-house. “You may lean on familiar players such as systems integrators, managed services providers, or consultancies, but your partners might also include a platform provider, an open source community, or even your biggest competitors.”
Customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) will measure your success. A successful cloud strategy requires working closely across a company’s various units to make sure that they have found and implemented the appropriate set of cloud services. Internal stakeholders can easily and directly purchase a cloud solution on their own, which could circumvent the company’s overall enterprise cloud strategy. “Cloud is now your product; retain what people love about it (it’s on demand, easy to configure, and provides rich services), and improve the experience further.”
“In an era of increasing digital sameness, cloud itself is not the key differentiator,” said Forrester in conclusion. “It’s a cloud strategy that provides the launchpad for innovation. Architecture and development leaders must work with all internal and external partners to develop a cloud strategy that delivers real value to their organizations and avoids the stagnation, overspending, and poor alignment that plagues too many cloud strategies. These fundamentals will give you the building blocks to develop and implement the strategy that will modernize your tech and differentiate your experiences.”
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