Ensure cloud adoption success with cloud operating model

In order to respond to these market forces, it’s essential that organisations remodel themselves as dynamic businesses, giving themselves the flexibility to embrace speed, agility, innovation in the shortest time and reducing cost resulting in greater growth and profitability.

As a result, more organisations are looking at a cloud-centric operating model to remake themselves and realise the benefits of a dramatically different way of running a business.

This is a challenging proposition for many enterprises transitioning from a more traditional IT operating model; one where the IT department sources services reactively and at a fixed cost. But the shift to the cloud is a totally new paradigm that promises to digitally transform the way businesses are run. Running off the cloud, IT becomes the engine for responsive growth and agility where IT serves the business goals efficiently and dynamically, often in real-time and at a variable, not fixed, cost.

The question then is how does your enterprise organise all the technical and non-technical aspects of the cloud, and how does it transform the current IT operating model into the cloud operating model needed in the new world? 

This transformation is driven by changing business requirements (read: digital disruptions) where the enterprise is expected to continuously perform a balancing act between its core functions (sales, finance, manufacturing, etc) and the business units (product divisions, geographic segments, etc) in investing, generating revenue, ensuring customer satisfaction and managing costs to ensure profitability.

One of the routes to embracing this new, cloud operating model is to build a dynamic organisation that will transform and modernise applications and infrastructure. As companies migrate operations to a cloud architecture, the balance shifts from the core functions toward the business units, from a Capex mode to an Opex mindset, shifting dependencies on traditional functional IT services to a service-centric structure.

The hybrid cloud offers enterprises an accelerated path to a service-centric IT platform, one where IT shifts focus from infrastructure to workloads and applications. And it’s clear that many businesses agree. According to research firm IDC, an estimated 65% of Asia- Pacific enterprises will commit to hybrid cloud architecture in 20161.

The COM framework acknowledges that businesses are at different stages with cloud adoption and offers them a framework to identify their current level of maturity. It defines what their end state should look like and recommends how users can move themselves through the stages of euphoria to reality to maturity.

The COM framework also serves as a roadmap to help organisations define their future state of maturity; one where they have the capabilities to deliver services to their customers and employees using a software-defined architecture and the hybrid cloud. In each critical area of operation— security, networking, personnel, interoperability and automation— Singtel offers a blueprint to assess where organisations want to be and the tools and services to reach their hybrid cloud destination.

The most successful cloud adoptions include fundamental changes to every aspect of a business’ IT operations model, extending well beyond technology to include people and processes. The industry is evolving from the euphoria of cloud and realising the reality and trying to get to maturity. The reality is that the outcomes that businesses aspired for may have been sporadic and non-repeatable. The challenge for those seeking to follow the footsteps of other’s limited successes, is that each transformation has followed its own unique path, and those who’ve enjoyed success see this as part of their secret sauce and are keeping the details to themselves.

If we want to see mass success with hybrid cloud adoption, businesses need a blueprint to follow. In particular, industries such as financial services and healthcare, with strict governance guidelines, require clearly documented framework for the adoption of new technologies. A framework that gets them to cloud maturity – something that is repeatable and prepares them for the future.

The goal of the Cloud Operating Model (COM) is to accelerate the adoption of hybrid cloud and get enterprises to maturity. IDC measures an organisation’s current hybrid cloud maturity on a five-step scale, from ad hoc, through to optimised. It identifies the dimensions of core IT and business readiness for an organisation, giving them clear outcomes to measure at full maturity. For each stage of maturity, the COM provides a framework for operations to build a certain set of capabilities.

The model addresses the need for cultural change including forming new team structures, creating new roles and acquiring new skills. The traditional silos of server, security, storage and network translates into service owners, DevOps/Cloud Ops, platform engineering, etc. This should lead to convergence of skills, better productivity and an agile organisation prepared for digital transformation.

It warrants the need for collaboration with other lines of business (LOB) and finance—the core functions of the enterprise. Ideally, your IT department will give LOB users the ability to launch and consume cloud services themselves. You should also be able to track usage and bill departments inside your company. If your IT department doesn’t operate this way, it will likely become bogged down with managing constant software releases and service requests.

These new ways of working set the scene for adopting new processes for managing cloud services. This includes creating new workflows and policies, for example around API usage. This approach paves the way for standardisation, optimisation and ultimately automation, where the end state would be for businesses to automate policy-based brokering of service requests across hybrid resources.

Alongside this, a governance framework provides the structure for moving budgets from Capex to Opex, defining new KPIs and SLAs and evaluating and adapting existing security policies. Policies driven governance to drive stricter compliance and better user empowerment.
For example, will a test server and production server be deployed differently? Is there an advantage to having some applications run on your on-premises data server, and others in the cloud? Automating the selection and migration of workloads can allow your developers, testers and infrastructure engineers to create and deploy software quickly and easily. The model also addresses an approach to developing an ecosystem of service and industry application partners to support your organisation’s transformation drive.

The advantage in implementing COM is that the enterprise can quickly test and publish new services without being tied up with complicated questions about where and how workloads are hosted and in what cloud. Organisations will know how much they are spending on cloud infrastructure at any moment, and be able to easily and quickly adjust spending as budgets change, ultimately allowing them to validate cloud strategy and spending. Most importantly, the business can respond much faster and cost-effectively.

While intended as a blueprint for hybrid cloud success, the model is adaptable to an organisation’s needs. Generally, around 60% of the COM framework will be applicable to every business, with the remainder being personalised to your unique set of circumstances. For example, if your data centre contract is expiring, or you are looking to build a new cloud native app, your software/hardware is end-of-life, or you are looking for a new partner to manage your infrastructure, you should consider creating a software-defined infrastructure across multiple clouds.

A pre-requisite for success is having a clear strategy and a set of goals for the IT organisation that are clearly linked to the goals of the business. The COM can provide a framework and the building blocks to develop this strategy and define these goals. 

Transforming your business is important and necessary; on-going market disruption means that the inability for businesses to quickly respond to market threats and opportunities puts them at a competitive disadvantage and poses survival threats. 

It’s essential that IT organisations are aligned to these challenges and structured in such a way that allows the business to be innovative and to act with speed and agility. This requirement goes well beyond technology adoption and needs to start with people and process.