To Cloud and Beyond – HexaRising ‘19

I had a chance to be the moderator for a client panel on the topic of Cloudification titled ‘Partly Cloudy with a chance of fog’ during our annual customer meet, ‘HexaRising 2019’!

The setting was in Disney’s lovely Dolphin resort in sunny & warm Orlando – a stark contrast to the rest of the country which was recovering from the sub-zeros of the polar vortex. The topic was timely – It has been 10 years since Cloud as a term hit the Gartner hype cycle and while everyone now agrees about the relevance and importance of Cloud; making it work in enterprise settings and moving to a Cloud-first and Cloud-only future state still remains a vexing challenge for many organizations.

The brightest spot was the diverse, experienced and very-articulate client panel – We had a mix of executives from a leading Big Four Professional Services firm, one of the largest mortgage financing companies, a market leader in Health Information & Clinical Research and the fastest-growing Trust & Corporate services company. On the face of it, not much in common across their businesses, but as we engaged in a spirited conversation over the course of an hour which held the audience that consisted of their peers in rapt attention, we realized they had several experiences and examples and amplified each other’s Cloud journey and challenges.

We covered the drivers for their organizations’ Cloud journeys and the strategic imperatives behind it. We also asked them to talk about the specific use cases that were a natural fit for Cloud adoption/migration, moving analytics and transaction processing to the Cloud, developing engagement & collaborating workspaces that are Cloud native, to leveraging the power of public Cloud while still managing a hybrid existence, we heard it all. One point of concurrence was that there are clear areas and business imperatives like agility, speed to market and managing large computing loads that would be impossible to execute without leveraging Cloud infrastructure.

The challenges they came across had a common theme too: Lack of skilled Cloud practitioners to successfully enable some of the key initiatives and accelerate the movement. Another limitation was the aspect around change management and governance of the Cloud transformation & orchestration efforts: Mostly unclear and foggy!

An interesting feature that got discussed and was germane to each of the participants was the regulated nature of their business and the resulting compliance & privacy requirements that constrained the adoption of various Cloud features and models.

The panelists were quite clear about what lies at the end of the road in terms of ‘What next for Cloud?’. In a few years’ time, almost everything will be on Cloud and no one will talk about it as an optional choice.

But what lies ahead and what it will take to get to that end remains foggy and unclear!

Getting the balance right between the guardrails of security, resiliency, privacy, agility & efficiency while orchestrating the Cloud transformation with the right skill sets & governance model as the guiding principles that light the way – that is what it will take, was the panel’s conclusion!

About HexaRising

HexaRising is a larger-than-life customer-meet from Hexaware. 2019 saw the event held at the luxurious Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort, Orlando, FL between 6^th – 8^th February. The event was punctuated by star-studded keynotes, networking activities to unwind and insightful fun.

Cloudify Everything^®

Cloudify Everything^® is Hexaware’s flagship path-breaking strategy that calls upon disruptive cloud solutions, tools and platforms. The cloud adoption paradigm mandates complete lifecycle on cloud, providing the right IT infrastructure environment for driving digital transformation plans achieving targeted business objectives.