Is The Cloud Right For You?!

“Cloud computing” is that magnificent umbrella technology term that is broadly used to describe everything from ordering groceries online to keeping track of asset logistics across the globe.

If you are one of our avid followers, you might remember that, when we refer to “The Cloud”, we talk about the infrastructure that lets your people do data analytics at a wide scale. We’ve written pieces on data architecture principles to provide a guide for how to ‘treat data’ through your modernization journey. And we’ve provided tools like the Data Maturity Survey to assess where you might be, along that journey.

This week, we’re sharing a piece from 451 Research that we think will help you survive through the inevitable ups and downs of your digital and cloud transformation.

Experience and Performance

If you’ve looked at making Data Analytics work on the Amazon, Microsoft or Google Clouds, you know that our guidance has always been to focus on two important guiding principles: providing world-class experience to your people and guaranteeing optimal performance for your I.T. systems.

The 451 “Cloud Transformation Model” aligns well with these ideas and it adds another set of key considerations: costs (savings and increases), security (governance and optimization) and consumption (full migration or Hybrid IT).

Hybrid as the “New Normal”

The cloud transformation journey model details the likely ups and downs an organization will go through on its way to realizing business value from the Cloud.

It’s important to understand that the process is both incremental and iterative and that value will vary by application: not every use-case might make sense in the Cloud. This means that your enterprise will most likely end up in a Hybrid mode, managing workloads and applications across multiple platforms and multiple clouds. Our latest survey indicated that Hybrid would be the norm, with 81% of respondents expecting their environment to be multi-cloud and multi-platform.

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Four Stages to Business Value

“A key part of digital transformation is the flexibility to act quickly and take chances” says the 451 Research Team. That is true, but as your team grows through its Cloud transformation tribulations, it will realize that extreme coordination between internal and external teams is required to succeed. Evolving from an exercise that’s often initially viewed as a cost-savings project to a transformative change journey that scales your business is no small feat: you might have heard of Barclays’ journey as it went “all-in on the Amazon Cloud”. The effort took 2 years and required internal contingents of storage and virtualization experts combined with external security and operations consultants (featured in Forbes and ComputerWorld)…

We invite you to read the full report here and learn more about how you can make a difference today!

The Cloud Transformation Journey

451 Research’s four stage model starts with the “Great Expectations” phase. This is when the answer to “Why Cloud Now” is formulated. Reasons range from the need to save budget, an enterprise’s inability to find appropriate staff to scale or integration requirements from a third party. 451 offers a unique view on cost increase consequences as the organization decides to consolidate applications or worse, move data, re-architect or rebuild entire applications…

As you well know by now, AtScale believes in a “No Data Movement” and a “No Application Movement” approach. You can read about the success stories of our customers on our customer page. Most recently, you might have read about the story of a large retailer that moved from traditional on-premise to the Cloud, without creating any change or disruption to its end users. Employees used Microsoft Excel on a traditional Big Data system before AtScale. After AtScale, they used the exact same application but on Google BigQuery (AtScale is the only software that lets Microsoft Excel work in live multidimensional mode on Google BigQuery). Users barely noticed the change, except the fact that they could analyze more data and faster!

The first Stage of the 451 Research model is critical as it sets up your team to success with the subsequent phases:

• Wuthering Heights: a stage marked by cost increase as a result of better accessibility (a system the firm call the “Jevons Paradox”).
• War and Peace: teams are learning how to manage the Cloud and its utilization. Policies are set and IT is working with vendors to optimize cost. Teams learn build processes and acquire tools that help them strike a balance between convenient access and governance. While more users can consume more freely, data access still needs to be managed and utilization costs needs to be properly be allocated (chargebacks…etc).
• Brave New World: or the destination every enterprise is aiming to reach. With full visibility, access control and cost governance, the enterprise now can optimize application use across Cloud and on-premise assets.

451 Research doesn’t share how many enterprises they think have reached the “Brave New World” stage. However it indicates that the majority of companies are most likely in the “War and Peace” phase and that “invisible infrastructure that ‘just works’ is still years away”.

We agree. If you think you need help, let us know how we can help @ www.atscale.com/cloud