An Enterprise Cloud Maturity Model for 2018…

Stage #1  Provisional

At the first beginner stage, Cloud Computing & its associate terms- IaaS, Containers, Orchestration, SaaS etc are not terms that the organization is aware of.

• Most of the infrastructure is run is internally hosted with two and more datacenters spread across a country or spanning one/two continents.
• The total application estate numbers in the hundreds. The organization also lacks central IT architecture standards and it is mostly a mishmash of applications.
• The process followed in developing these applications ranges from waterfall to different forms of agile but the monolithic architecture/three-tier architecture hinders flexibility in the applications themselves
•  The hardware platforms are a mix of proprietary & open Unix variants (HP UX, Solaris, Linux etc) to Windows.
• Lines of business in these organizations are typically unhappy with the inflexibility of the underlying infrastructure & view IT as a bottleneck
• Thus, IT groups tend to be heavily siloed with influential lines of business making their own technology purchasing decisions.

Stage #2  Virtualized

For organizations in the second stage, server virtualization is heavily deployed across the board.  While terms such as IaaS, Containers, Orchestration, SaaS etc are things being actively discussed across development, infrastructure and operations teams – the predominant model is running vendor supplied software to manage large fleets of virtual instances – often hundreds of thousands.

• Most of the infrastructure is run is internally hosted with two and more datacenters spread across a country or spanning one/two continents. However, there is growing interest in lines of business using public cloud due to their dissatisfaction in central IT providing them servers with long lead times (typically between 1 and 2 months)
• While the total application estate numbers in the hundreds, enterprises in this stage have begun setting down central IT architecture standards to reduce application sprawl.
• In a move to improve flexibility around monolithic architecture/three-tier architectures, these organizations begin adopting DevOps-y practices at specific points in the development lifecycle. These include unit testing, continuous integration & real-time application monitoring. The common goal is to reduce errors in applications and to reduce mean time to detecting failures in live applications serving customers.
• While silos are being broken down in IT, there is a bid to rationalize data & application assets, purchasing decisions are shared between lines of business and the IT group
• Shadow IT begins to show up more and more.
• However, the costs associated with proprietary virtualization have begun to constrain budgets. Lines of business are accelerating moves to Linux based virtualization running on commodity servers to stay cost-competitive. However, system administration skills and costs associated with migration remain a significant bottleneck.
  

Stage #3  Cloud Ready

At the Cloud Ready stage, the organization due to its leadership realizes that their target IT endstate will be a cloud-based delivery of IT services – be those applications or servers or storage or application stacks for developers.

• The organization typically under the direction of a CIO undertakes a large portfolio rationalization exercise where applications are being targeted for a move to a public or a private cloud – based on granular criteria.
•  The move to a cloud is dictated by Quantitative factors – economics (such as infrastructure costs, developer/admin training/interoperability costs), Return on investment (ROI), the number of years/quarters passed before breakeven & Qualitative factors –  the tolerance of the business for short-term pain, the need for the enterprise to catch up with and disarm competition etc. It may also very useful to combine this analysis with existing IT vendor investments,  (contracts and the like) across full global infrastructure footprint so that a holistic picture of the risk/rewards continuum be built. One also needs to take into account if combining planned cloud spend can somehow be incorporated into existing legacy modernization/re-platforming projects or datacenter consolidation projects.
• Other criteria which dictate these moves vary from needed levels of regulation, and performance. Typically enterprise applications will continue to live on-prem.
• Greenfield applications that can benefit from a cloud-based development and delivery model based on business requirements will move to the public cloud. These applications are being developed using a DevOps process. This includes CI/CD pipelines and monitoring – services easily available on public clouds.
• At this stage, teams complaining about the high cost of proprietary virtualization will tend towards POCs on a private cloud – typically OpenStack running KVM as a hypervisor.
• As a result of the portfolio analysis, a vast majority of monolithic applications are being targeted for an initial lift and shift, which means that they are going to be ported over to the cloud running on VMs. Re-platforming code remains an ideal if an elusive option due to cost considerations.

Stage #4  Cloud Optimized

At the Cloud Ready stage, the organization due to its leadership realizes that their target IT endstate will be a cloud-based delivery of IT services – be those applications or servers or storage or application stacks for developers.

• Given rapidly maturing cloud-based delivery models (IaaS and SaaS) – enterprises in this stage compulsorily include an awareness of cloud-native architecture strategies and design across these four key technical domains.
• Cloud Native ways of developing applications become the defacto standard.Cloud Native applications need to be architected, designed, developed, packaged, delivered and managed based on a deep understanding of the frameworks of cloud computing. The application itself is designed for scalability, resiliency, and incremental enhance-ability from the get-go. Depending on the application, supporting tenets include IaaS deployment & management; and Container Orchestration. These applications need to support the development of & incremental enhancements using agile principles.  The fundamental truth is that not only will this change how your infrastructure is provisioned & deployed but also how it is managed.
• Cloud Architecture in this stage spans four critical areas – 1) Business Architecture, 2) Data Architecture, 3) Application Design & 4) Deployment Architecture.
• Firms realize that Operational costs are far and away the biggest in running a private cloud, not hardware or power or cooling. This will result in enterprises shifting workloads back from public clouds to private clouds.

My Recommendations…

Whatever stage you are in at this point of time, you will be further along in months or years depending on the pressures in your business. With the easy availability of public cloud services, many larger enterprises have significant “shadow IT” expense in addition to the cost of supporting existing internal infrastructure. What then are some best practice recommendations that firms at any stage of cloud maturity can take value from? I posit that there are six key things…

1. Drive the business case with economics and business value realization models in mind. An inefficiently designed cloud landscape can actually be catastrophic for business in terms of both cost and operational challenges.
2. Consider a range of hybrid cloud architectures keeping the above maturity levels and architectures in mind. Avoid lock-in to IaaS providers or to cloud stacks as much as possible. As a way of derisking, invest in a private cloud strategy. The public cloud will never be a panacea.
3. The biggest pain point in running a hybrid cloud is OpEx maintenance costs. Consider a Managed SaaS that deploys, monitors, troubleshoots and seamlessly updates your private cloud, so you can rest assured you’ve got the most advanced private cloud management at the lowest possible operational cost, for years to come.
4. Multi-cloud management is a challenge cloud admins will need to deal with and something management needs to account for in the entire business case – economics, value realization, headcount planning, chargeback etc. The ‘single pane of management’ is a worthy goal to aspire to. However, beware of vendors selling ‘integrated’ stacks. These are as much a lockin as are the public cloud APIs.
5.  Leveraging successful blueprints and patterns around vertical industry adoption. How are leaders in your industry using the cloud for specific usecases common to everyone operating in the vertical?
6. Investments in SaaS-based management planes across three important dimensions – private, public cloud and containers – are key. These will serve as a way of derisking your hybrid cloud and container management investments.