Go beyond cloud first — be cloud smart
While choosing cloud is a crucial step for every enterprise, what does "cloud first" really look like?
Cloud is now mainstream. In every sector, business and technology leaders know that being in the cloud brings them essential agility, efficiency and resilience. By 2025, 80% of enterprises are expected to shut down their traditional data centers altogether.
The burden of legacy data centers
The costs of real estate are high. Older data centers tend not to be energy efficient. Data center operations can be CapEx-intensive and demand scarce technology skills. So implementing a data center exit strategy usually makes perfect sense (with certain exceptions, such as in the defense sector). It’s what Atos has been doing for over a decade. Working collaboratively with our clients, we have closed 112 data centers since 2010 and moved hundreds of workloads to cloud.
Responding to need, today’s hyperscalers have set the market standard for convenient, pay-as-you-go cloud services. Powered by automation, they offer fast and flexible API-based consumption via the Internet. It’s no surprise, therefore, that more and more large enterprises are choosing public cloud.
But is moving all workloads to cloud really the best data center exit strategy? In short, the answer is no.
By 2028, cloud computing will shift from being a technology disruptor to becoming a necessary component for maintaining business competitiveness. IT spending on public cloud services continues to rise unabated.
Gartner, November 2023
How to avoid the perpetual migration problem
Let’s look at what’s happening. Analysts say that as of 2023, 50% of enterprises had workloads in the public cloud, with 7% planning to move additional workloads to cloud in the following 12 months. Another recent report found less than 10% of the largest organizations have successfully moved mission-critical apps to the cloud.
These statistics reflect a reality: if you’re a large enterprise, the applications landscape is mixed. Some applications can’t be moved without major rework. Others simply can’t be moved at all. Without the right approach, public cloud migration can turn into an everlasting story. That’s why the key to every successful cloud-first strategy is to comprehensively answer one question: “What exactly is the right landing zone for each application?”
Application-driven and up-front
Every cloud migration program should be application-driven. In other words, infrastructure can only be devised successfully with a clear understanding of where each application will land. Just as a bridge can only be properly designed when you know whether it will carry pedestrians, trains or cars.
This assessment should be done before deciding where and how much cloud capacity to procure. I have seen cases where companies have purchased public cloud capacity, only later to discover that 30-40% of it couldn’t be utilized. Analyst research underlines this, with organizations wasting 30% of their cloud spending (on average). This is manifested in various ways, from unused or under-utilized instances, to over-provisioned resources.
Seven key questions about your cloud transformation
An expert view is vital to consider the overall business strategy and transformation roadmap, together with an assessment of the exact characteristics of each application and its related data. For this, there are seven key questions you should ask:
- Is this application technically eligible to move to cloud?
- Is the workload flat or variable?
- When is this application going to be replaced/redeveloped?
- Do specific features or functionalities of hyperscaler services offer particular benefits?
- Is there a sovereignty requirement or a data access or security component?
- What is its relationship with the rest of the landscape in terms of data and latency?
- What is the cost of running in the cloud versus other options?
Based on the answers, within the broader business context and with detailed analysis of the interdependencies between applications, it is then possible to develop a smart cloud migration plan, with a roadmap for each application.
Overcoming complexity
So, while cloudification is worth the journey, it requires careful design, planning and execution over a significant period – especially where legacy IT landscapes are involved. The process of transforming the application portfolio into software as a service, cloud-native or cloud-compatible apps takes some time.
What’s more, public cloud is not always the most cost-effective solution. For example, complex batch processing or a mission-critical heavy transactional workload might be better suited to a mainframe platform, potentially delivered by a mainframe service provider. A data center exit plan should include a range of options to complement public cloud: private cloud, on-premises infrastructure, or hosted in third-party data centers provided by system integrators or colocation vendors.
The right approach: Cloud first AND cloud smart
Orchestrating a data center exit with a smart cloud approach requires specialized expertise. Get it wrong, and the consequences can be painful in terms of renegotiated rental rates or other penalties. If your starting point is to close your data center, particularly if your exit date is driven by a leasing or real estate dependency, the best approach is to decouple your exit timetable from that of your cloud migration.
This means accepting that some workloads — once they exit your data center — will not immediately land in the cloud.
It’s clear that for this next phase of business evolution, cloud is an essential part of the story. It’s just not the whole story. Any business can still be cloud first. But it should also be cloud smart.
Posted on: May 22, 2024
