We are in the cusp of a big industry-wide transformation- and cloud and big-data are key enablers for this change
We are in the early stages of a huge industry wide IT transformation. Cloud computing and Big Data are two key technologies ushering in this significant transformation. While cloud computing potentially offers disproportionate gains in IT efficiencies, big-data analytics is about unleashing corporate data assets for significant business advantage and value.
The ‘90’s was all about IT adoption though in the latter part it became more of IT proliferation. In the early 2000s organizations recognized the need to simplify and were already looking into ways to reduce IT expenses. However, instead of big bang transformations, they took a conservative approach of “lift and shift.” There was hardly any IT or business process transformation– the same job function was simply moved to a low cost region. While this easily realized savings, it could only be done once and did not address efficiency. For most organizations the potential for significant IT and business process optimization still remains untapped and we believe that the 2010’s will be about IT simplification and optimization within the enterprises that is realized via transformation. While significant cost savings is certainly a great by-product of such transformation, more importantly it forces businesses to rethink their core and restructure their supporting IT to get to “optimal-IT" and thereby allowing them to focus more on growth and innovation around their core businesses.
In order to get to optimal IT driven business processes– enterprises will have to take on the arduous task of carefully analyzing their business applications and processes and abstracting out their core processes from the underlying technology. Transparency of a company’s business applications from the underlying technology, will allow companies to become nimble, allowing them to move away from a fixed cost IT model to a model that can readily accommodate variability via flexible sourcing. As a result, organizations will be able to reduce IT expenses, reduce time to value, eliminate barriers to entry and to growth by optimal choice of any combination of private cloud, public cloud or a hybrid cloud model.
"Clouds"- A key enabler
The term “cloud” means many different things to many different people but the underlying principles have been around for a long time. For us private cloud means an infrastructure comprised of core computing elements and application components that is purpose built once and shared by all business applications for a single organization. The sharing is enabled by the proper abstractions that separate core business processes from the underlying technology. The implementation of the overall computing stack may reside in its current location at the corporate data-centers, maybe in a public data-center and managed by the enterprise’s IT staff or outsourced to third party managed services. Other than this notion of sharing between many business applications there are other characteristics such as flexibility (or transparency), manageability, elasticity and high availability that are enabled. The savings in cost comes from the fact that shared private clouds now support many business applications resulting in much smaller technology footprint for the organization. Public clouds are infrastructure components and platform stacks that are offered as a service, physically located in service provider premises and are shared by many organizations that consume the service. Public clouds have the potential for greater cost efficiencies due to the economies of scale that are enabled by industry wide sharing. Public clouds are potentially low cost and offer little differentiation—custom solutions in the public cloud will come at a hefty price. While organizations will be able to leverage infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering component services such as servers and storage without much customization, consuming platform as a service (PaaS) becomes much more trickier– particularly when dealing with legacy. Many corporations will adopt a hybrid cloud strategy where on-premise clouds solutions are combined with public cloud resources in a variety of ways. Organizations may choose to deploy non-core functions in public clouds while “core” is kept on-premise; they may choose to offset temporary peaks or provision disaster recovery sites in public clouds or they may choose public clouds for non-production environments. Whatever the case may be ensuring seamless and secure operation between the public and private clouds will be challenge that hybrid clouds will have to address.
In order to make this paradigm shift companies will first have to analyze their core business processes and applications, identify what will constitute shared common services and then define a technology architecture that will support their business processes and applications on shared implementation of the architecture that will constitute the private cloud. Non-functional requirements such as business continuity, manageability, serviceability, performance, availability, integration and security must be accounted for according to the company’s business needs. A good end-state architecture is great but hardly of any use if there is no execution roadmap from current to desired end-state. Companies will have to convert architecture vision to an implementation and subsequently drive adoption of that shared implementation. The migration from current to future is complicated because it not only involves technology– but people and processes as well.
Organizational barriers to cloud adoption
Getting to cloud model will not be an easy task for most organizations and the challenges are both technical as well as cultural. Other than the CEO/CFO and business owners-- few in the IT organization will have serious interest in reducing a 1Billion dollar IT budget down to 500M. IT service owners within the organization will be reluctant to cannibalize their competencies and certainly vendors that have large revenue streams from such organizations will resist. Serious change agents within the IT organization that see the light often will become a casualty of the political dynamics within the organization unless backed by the highest ranked business leaders of the organization. Transformative changes from within existing organizations means asking the same set of people to do things differently—tall order indeed! Finally, like with most organizations, savings will be expected without any interim increase in spend— and that, expectations of something for nothing, often is the biggest barrier.
Interestingly enough, while cloud is about reducing cost, big data is about business growth—and both happen to be IT led. If roles and responsibilities are permanently threatened—transformation can grind to a halt. But when posed as a mix shift—roles and responsibilities in traditional IT are transformed to Big Data roles, transformation becomes more palatable to the ones affected.
We are in the early stages of a huge industry wide IT transformation. Cloud computing and Big Data are two key technologies ushering in this significant transformation. While cloud computing potentially offers disproportionate gains in IT efficiencies, big-data analytics is about unleashing corporate data assets for significant business advantage and value.
The ‘90’s was all about IT adoption though in the latter part it became more of IT proliferation. In the early 2000s organizations recognized the need to simplify and were already looking into ways to reduce IT expenses. However, instead of big bang transformations, they took a conservative approach of “lift and shift.” There was hardly any IT or business process transformation– the same job function was simply moved to a low cost region. While this easily realized savings, it could only be done once and did not address efficiency. For most organizations the potential for significant IT and business process optimization still remains untapped and we believe that the 2010’s will be about IT simplification and optimization within the enterprises that is realized via transformation. While significant cost savings is certainly a great by-product of such transformation, more importantly it forces businesses to rethink their core and restructure their supporting IT to get to “optimal-IT" and thereby allowing them to focus more on growth and innovation around their core businesses.
In order to get to optimal IT driven business processes– enterprises will have to take on the arduous task of carefully analyzing their business applications and processes and abstracting out their core processes from the underlying technology. Transparency of a company’s business applications from the underlying technology, will allow companies to become nimble, allowing them to move away from a fixed cost IT model to a model that can readily accommodate variability via flexible sourcing. As a result, organizations will be able to reduce IT expenses, reduce time to value, eliminate barriers to entry and to growth by optimal choice of any combination of private cloud, public cloud or a hybrid cloud model.
"Clouds"- A key enabler
The term “cloud” means many different things to many different people but the underlying principles have been around for a long time. For us private cloud means an infrastructure comprised of core computing elements and application components that is purpose built once and shared by all business applications for a single organization. The sharing is enabled by the proper abstractions that separate core business processes from the underlying technology. The implementation of the overall computing stack may reside in its current location at the corporate data-centers, maybe in a public data-center and managed by the enterprise’s IT staff or outsourced to third party managed services. Other than this notion of sharing between many business applications there are other characteristics such as flexibility (or transparency), manageability, elasticity and high availability that are enabled. The savings in cost comes from the fact that shared private clouds now support many business applications resulting in much smaller technology footprint for the organization. Public clouds are infrastructure components and platform stacks that are offered as a service, physically located in service provider premises and are shared by many organizations that consume the service. Public clouds have the potential for greater cost efficiencies due to the economies of scale that are enabled by industry wide sharing. Public clouds are potentially low cost and offer little differentiation—custom solutions in the public cloud will come at a hefty price. While organizations will be able to leverage infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering component services such as servers and storage without much customization, consuming platform as a service (PaaS) becomes much more trickier– particularly when dealing with legacy. Many corporations will adopt a hybrid cloud strategy where on-premise clouds solutions are combined with public cloud resources in a variety of ways. Organizations may choose to deploy non-core functions in public clouds while “core” is kept on-premise; they may choose to offset temporary peaks or provision disaster recovery sites in public clouds or they may choose public clouds for non-production environments. Whatever the case may be ensuring seamless and secure operation between the public and private clouds will be challenge that hybrid clouds will have to address.
In order to make this paradigm shift companies will first have to analyze their core business processes and applications, identify what will constitute shared common services and then define a technology architecture that will support their business processes and applications on shared implementation of the architecture that will constitute the private cloud. Non-functional requirements such as business continuity, manageability, serviceability, performance, availability, integration and security must be accounted for according to the company’s business needs. A good end-state architecture is great but hardly of any use if there is no execution roadmap from current to desired end-state. Companies will have to convert architecture vision to an implementation and subsequently drive adoption of that shared implementation. The migration from current to future is complicated because it not only involves technology– but people and processes as well.
Organizational barriers to cloud adoption
Getting to cloud model will not be an easy task for most organizations and the challenges are both technical as well as cultural. Other than the CEO/CFO and business owners-- few in the IT organization will have serious interest in reducing a 1Billion dollar IT budget down to 500M. IT service owners within the organization will be reluctant to cannibalize their competencies and certainly vendors that have large revenue streams from such organizations will resist. Serious change agents within the IT organization that see the light often will become a casualty of the political dynamics within the organization unless backed by the highest ranked business leaders of the organization. Transformative changes from within existing organizations means asking the same set of people to do things differently—tall order indeed! Finally, like with most organizations, savings will be expected without any interim increase in spend— and that, expectations of something for nothing, often is the biggest barrier.
Interestingly enough, while cloud is about reducing cost, big data is about business growth—and both happen to be IT led. If roles and responsibilities are permanently threatened—transformation can grind to a halt. But when posed as a mix shift—roles and responsibilities in traditional IT are transformed to Big Data roles, transformation becomes more palatable to the ones affected.