Cloud Transformation – A Strategic Choice, A Rewarding Journey

With the cloud offering sustained secure business value, the high adopters are reaping the greatest benefits. The possibilities of the cloud help monetize data, increase operational efficiencies and drive increased customer satisfaction. The deep strategic value offered through proven business agility has given the early adaptors the opportunity to experiment and innovate further for business transformation. They have set precedents for the rest to follow suit.

The public cloud service market is expected to reach $623.3 billion by 2023 worldwide

There are some key questions organizations need to factor in when looking to migrate to the cloud.

Is there a cloud transformation strategy in place for firming up the cloud migration roadmap? Have industry best practices been given the utmost attention? Is the transformation blueprint aligned with the organizations strategic and business objectives? Is the organization’s culture welcome to a better way of working?

Yes, there is a lot at stake.

Let’s just take a quick look at what cloud transformation is all about, the need for a cloud strategy and the different cloud migration strategies that organizations leverage for their cloud adoption needs. With the cloud here to stay and grow, the “what can be done” paradigm has transitioned to a “what more can be done” perspective.

What is cloud transformation?

In simple parlance, cloud transformation would mean migrating your workloads to the cloud with the objective of enabling the business to be more agile and responsive. It would require an organization mindset change with people, process and technology all set to embrace a new operational model.

The real value of cloud transformation lies in the organization getting future ready to respond to changing market dynamics, embrace technology innovation and stay a step ahead of the competition. The journey towards cloud transformation thus would touch every aspect of the business and requires a proactive approach to creating and managing positive change.

Why do you need a cloud strategy?

Cloud transformation is a continuous process of improvement, evolving with best practices and emerging technologies. There is an ever increasing need for organizations to learn from failures and be one with best practices and emerging technologies. A well-defined, clear cloud strategy is crucial to successful business transformation.

At the broader level it should answer the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the transition to the cloud. The strategy roadmap should factor in crucial enablers like cost, availability and security and align with the business objectives of agility, flexibility, productivity, resilience and growth. It makes sense to look at current state of the on-premise infrastructure, the desired state to be achieved, interlocked dependencies, the associated risks and an exit strategy.

The cloud strategy in a sense should be a live plan that gets updated as and when the digital infrastructure and the company goals evolve.

The Cloud Transformation journey – Points to ponder

Your cloud transformation journey comes at a cost and it is imperative for businesses to have a constant view of how these investments gets realized over the journey. Visibility and a handle on the cost benefit model is important. Beyond the buzz, there is a gestation time period for ROI that needs expectations to be set right. Also moving to a cloud first strategy also entails re-skilling of expertise at the workforce levels and the need to constantly train and upgrade to keep abreast on the technology front.

The tremendous opportunity the cloud provides can sometimes be weighed down by the challenges faced when getting applications cloud ready. A comprehensive cloud readiness assessment that can look at the entire value chain is invaluable.

Making the right choices with the scope for legacy modernization, transformation of data and analytics ecosystems, the migration approaches, the use of automation to fast track migration and real time scalability are challenges that need to be circumvented with actionable plans and measureable metrics.

Cloud Transformation – Migration strategies

With the right cloud transformation strategy in place, the cloud journey can lead to digital transformation that positively impacts revenue growth and customer experience. Once you have made the decision to migrate from on-premise to a public, private or hybrid cloud, the commonly known 6R’s are the migration strategies that you would bank on based on your unique organizational objectives.

Rehosting (Lift or Shift)

As the name suggests, it involves lifting your on-premise workloads from and shifting it to the cloud. With least upfront costs, this migration plan just moves an exact copy of the current environment into the new and requires lesser time and fewer resources. In a way it does not take advantage of the scalability and power of the cloud and is the simplest approach to cloud migration.

Replatforming

Also known as “lift-tinker-and-shift, replatforming might involve a few code modifications or addition of new features or legacy modernization to benefit from the new cloud infrastructure. Replatforming can be a cost effective approach and automation can fast track the migration process and help in TCO reduction. The core architecture of the application remains the same during replatforming.

Refactoring

This approach involves a complete re-look and re-architecting the application to make it more suited for the cloud landscape. The application code is modified to leverage cloud capabilities like auto scaling and applications can be optimized for higher performance. Though time consuming and resource demanding, it can take advantage of the full potential of the cloud environment.

Replace

For organizations that have to deal with changing application requirements or find that an application can no longer be useful during the cloud readiness assessment might prefer to buy an off-the-shelf product or go the SaaS route and replace the application. This approach takes the route of retiring anything that is underutilized and these workloads are not migrated.

Repurchase

This approach involves moving from an on-premises environment to a SaaS platform that will free up time and resources to spend on an applications maintenance and upkeep. Also known as “drop or shop” this can lower the costs of maintenance and lead to a quicker and easier path to upgrades, the organization benefiting from a fully managed solution.

Retain

There can be best practice scenarios where some applications might have wait for their turn in getting transitioned to the cloud. It could be a strategic reason, regulatory compliance, legacy nature or there might be added complexity for the asset to be moved at that point of time. There may be retained and revisited later based on organizational goals.

Automation has the right answers

Cloud migration being a one-size-fits-none endeavor requires meticulous planning in advance. Execution is of paramount importance. That is where automation can be your knight in shining armor.

Your business cases for cloud adoption will determine the ideal migration strategy and approach. Replatforming is one of the most popular approaches in recent times. Being a middle ground approach it has great potential for TCO reduction and quick ROI. Choosing the right tools for application replatforming does matter.

Hexaware’s Amaze™ for Applications is a cloud replatforming product suite primarily for Java and .NET applications. It is automation-led, replatforms an application in just 4 to 6 weeks, guarantees 50% TCO reduction, cuts down licensing costs, and reduces 75% of manual efforts.

Hexaware’s cloud modernization service, Amaze™ for Data & AI is another game changer that can enable rapid transformation and deployment of data and analytics ecosystems on all leading cloud platforms.

The cloud transformation roadmap starts with assessing the cloud readiness of the data and analytics ecosystem followed by an automated deep discovery of the schema, metadata, databases, ETL, reporting and the visualization layer. The next milestone is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that validates the transformation roadmap. The learning from the MVP sets into action a full-fledged transformation of the Data Warehouse, BI and analytics systems.

Automation totally drives the entire ETL code conversion, database schema transformation, data and reports movement that reduces time, efforts and cost involved by over 60%. Amaze™ for Data & AI also offers complete Cloud Data Application operations support and pre-built cloud-native AI / ML libraries for living on the cloud.

Conclusion

In toto, a cloud first approach on your radar at all times can help move the needle fast. A comprehensive cloud strategy that addresses the priorities perfectly and has clear end state goals can remove the complexity associated with the migration process. The cloud can be a catalyst for digital transformation, its cost and work efficacies, elasticity and scalability leading to newer business models. With customer experience the key driver for business growth, a cloud enabled operating model plays a vitally important role.

Framing a cloud transformation strategy that mirrors your enterprise unique business goals can pave the way for unlocking true business value in the short, mid and long term.

As they say, the sky is the limit. On the cloud.