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Enabling Enterprise Agility & Resilience with a Robust Cloud Strategy
Highlights
- The hybrid cloud strategy, a blend of enterprise infrastructure management experience and cloud capabilities, continues to emerge as a game-changer.
- It is a response to the modern IT landscape’s demand for agility, scalability, robust security, and rapid innovation.
- While multi-cloud might not be the go-to choice for many teams initially, circumstances such as mergers, acquisitions, and innovations can make it inevitable. Hence, proactive planning for this eventuality is more beneficial than avoidance.
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The evolution of cloud adoption
The past two decades have witnessed a revolution in cloud adoption. The initial skepticism around adoption, security, regulations, lack of control, lock-in concerns, low maturity of cloud technology, data center outages at cloud providers, and the overall limited functionality of the cloud is gone. Gartner® forecasts that: “By 2028, cloud computing will shift from being a technology disruptor to becoming a necessary component for maintaining business competitiveness”.1 According to us, cloud computing will evolve from a strategic advantage to a fundamental business necessity.
Decoding the seven Rs of cloud migration
Cloud migration strategies are frequently grouped into what is known as the seven Rs: rehost (lift and shift), relocate (hypervisor-level lift and shift), re-platform (lift and reshape), refactor (rearchitect), repurchase, retire, and retain (revisit).
Within the spectrum of cloud migration strategies, only re-platforming and refactoring are designed to partially harness the cloud’s comprehensive capabilities. While other strategies, such as rehosting and relocating, hold their merits in specific scenarios, they may not fully tap into cloud technology’s transformative potential.
So, when are rehosting and relocating effective strategies for an application?
- Applications that require minimal functional and technical modifications.
- Applications with a smaller user base, which are not critical to the organization’s operations and would have a minimal impact on core operations in case of downtime.
- Legacy and monolithic applications, for which the business does not anticipate any further investment.
- Applications for processes such as batch processing, which operate independently and do not require significant interaction with other systems.
The downside of the lift-and-shift approach
Many companies chose the lift-and-shift approach for its simplicity and speed, enabling quick cloud migration without extensive re-architecting. Success was gauged by the number of applications moved to the cloud, with some companies using this approach to experiment with non-critical applications. Once a business case was established, cloud migration was accelerated to reduce data center costs and shift from capital expenditure to a pay-as-you-go model.
However, the rush to migrate all workloads led to some unsuitable ones being moved. Despite initial success, realizing the strategic benefits of cloud requires long-term cost optimization, leveraging cloud-native capabilities, and making necessary security adjustments. For businesses, the main considerations include cost, performance, uptime, availability, and whether the technology can support business growth and scalability.
While the lift-and-shift strategy is commonly adopted, it comes with its own set of challenges:
- Like-to-like configurations or over-provisioning: On-premises environments are often over-provisioned to handle peak loads. Replicating this or over-provisioning based on other public-facing applications that need computing power leads to costlier configurations and often leaves resources unused.
- Hidden fees: Cloud providers charge for data storage and data transfer (egress fees). Applications designed for on-premises storage might incur high egress fees when constantly transferring data in and out of the cloud.
- Lack of cloud-native features: Lift and shift doesn’t take advantage of features such as serverless computing, auto-scaling, and managed services, all of which can significantly reduce costs on the cloud.
According to the Google Boardroom Stats report, “72% of cloud decision-makers view digital transformation as something more than a simple lift-and-shift exercise where systems are moved from data centers to the cloud”, and the once-favored lift-and-shift strategy for cloud migration has frequently not lived up to its promise. Reinforcing this, a substantial 72% of cloud decision-makers now view digital transformation as a process that transcends the basic lift-and-shift approach.
Enterprises facing the challenges mentioned above are reconsidering their decision to move to the cloud. Therefore, they are repatriating their data by either moving entirely from the public cloud to the on-premises data center or moving only certain workloads back, thereby adopting a hybrid approach.
Few companies will adopt the route of cloud repatriation
Cloud repatriation is a strategic decision that necessitates a thorough evaluation of the workloads in use. A complete retreat from the cloud is generally not advised. While the prospect of familiar territory and increased control may be appealing, it can stifle innovation and growth and negate the benefits of the cloud.
Hybrid cloud will continue to be a primary strategy for most large enterprises, with on-premises and cloud environments working in harmony to meet business needs. In this context, repatriation would be more about repurposing select workloads rather than completely abandoning the cloud.
Why multi-cloud strategy continues to be important:
- Leverage, flexibility, cost, and lock-in: Enterprises seek control over their strategy and desire to shift workloads between cloud providers for better support and cost benefits.
- Variable cloud capabilities: Business needs, particularly for non-core offerings such as IoT and ML, may necessitate different cloud service adoption.
- Shadow IT: Decentralized cloud adoption decisions can lead to multiple clouds in large organizations, facilitating greater control.
- Scale across regions: As the global growth plans of companies evolve, limited service availability in certain regions may prompt them to leverage other clouds.
- Business continuity: For critical applications, resilience may be built beyond a single cloud provider.
- Avoiding stagnation: If a competitor’s cloud develops superior features, the ability to switch based on needs is crucial.
- Regulation readiness: The speed at which a cloud provider can adapt to regulatory requirements varies, and having multiple clouds can facilitate workload switching in emergencies.
- Support for mergers and acquisitions: As enterprises grow through mergers and acquisitions, the combined entity naturally becomes multi-cloud if the acquired company uses a different cloud.
Steering through multi-cloud complexities
As enterprises contemplate repatriation and the shift towards a multi-cloud strategy, it is crucial to anticipate and prepare for the challenges that lie ahead:
- Complexity: Managing multiple cloud providers introduces complexity due to differences in services, APIs, and management interfaces.
- Security concerns: Security attacks are becoming more sophisticated and securing environments across multiple cloud providers can be complicated.
- Integration challenges: Integration with legacy systems and managing data sources in multiple locations requires thoughtful design and additional decisions.
- Cloud skills: Finding skilled cloud professionals is challenging, and the need for expertise in multiple clouds adds to this challenge.
- Architectural and feature differences: Each cloud provider has unique architectural elements and features that must be considered when deploying workloads.
- Network latency and bandwidth issues: Data transfer rates, latency, and bandwidth limitations can vary between cloud providers, affecting performance.
- Managing IT inventory: Teams may independently adopt cloud services without proper governance, making workload distribution and management challenging.
Hybrid is the future
Cloud repatriation isn’t a sign of retreat but a strategic realignment. Businesses are fine-tuning their workloads, selectively migrating certain applications back to on-premises environments.
The hybrid cloud strategy, a blend of enterprise infrastructure management experience and cloud capabilities, continues to emerge as a game-changer. It is a response to the modern IT landscape’s demand for agility, scalability, robust security, and rapid innovation.
While multi-cloud might not be the go-to choice for many teams initially, circumstances such as mergers, acquisitions, and innovations can make it inevitable. Hence, proactive planning for this eventuality is more beneficial than avoidance. Implementing a multi-cloud strategy calls for a robust architecture, firm guiding principles, clear workload distribution guidance, a reference architecture for adoption, and strict governance. This approach ensures efficient IT management while keeping costs under control.
1 Gartner Press Release, Gartner Says Cloud Will Become a Business Necessity by 2028, November 29, 2023, https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-11-29-gartner-says-cloud-will-become-a-business-necessity-by-2028 . GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc.
