Why are Cloud Services so important in Digital Strategy?

6 min readMay 11, 2020

In the context of digital transformation, where business models and technologies are used to leverage the company’s performance and customer experience, an essential enabler on this journey is Cloud adoption and for this reason, it has been the “foundation” that enables business transformation and the strategic focus “cloud-first” of many organizations - advancing the use of Cloud Services.

The cloud-first strategy must be understood by the entire organization (not just IT department), with the purpose to obtain business benefits, such as reducing operating costs, time to market and improving the scalability and security of applications. The purpose of companies may vary, where some are looking for the complete migration of their data centers, while others only a few subsets of applications for public cloud. Therefore, cloud-first does not mean cloud-always.

A good advantage in using Cloud Services is the use on demand (only the necessary resources, without large investments to start using), scalability and security, as the resources are managed by the provider. The drawing below represents the main Cloud Services that AWS offers:

Innovation — Build, Buy or Borrow

In general, continuing with the resources you already have know, expanding the use of existing technology is one of the options considered. Avoid the “resume-driven development” trap by letting people choose the right technologies for their own resume, and not to solve the problem.

If it is not possible to expand the use of existing technology, then use pay-as-you-go services. These managed services (or SaaS) reduce the workload in configuring and managing infrastructure items, dedicating more time to innovation and publishing new releases. The build decision for in-house technologies can generate waste of cost, time and opportunity. Evaluate well, because the product created, in general, is the competitive differential, and not the technology built.

There are some critical elements for innovation such as culture and people, processes and organization, products and technology. The Build, Buy or Borrow strategy can be used in this context, and summarized as follows:

Build: when you already have the expertise in the company, core business, intellectual property / patent or pioneer in the segment.
Buy: when it is a core activity to the business, it has a market strategy or critical time to launch.
Borrow: reduce risk, increase time to market and customization in specific markets.

When deciding to migrate to Cloud Services, the main benefits are:

Risk reduction: ability to adapt quickly to changes (by allowing frequent testing and quick corrections).
Scalability: resize your assets as needed.
Reliability: the system’s ability to recover from infrastructure or service failures or acquire resources to meet demand and mitigate disruptions.
Data security: total ownership over your data.

Cloud Migration

One of the most recommended strategies for cloud application migration is AWS 6R’s, based on Gartner’s 5R’s. This discussion, in general, occurs in the second phase (Portfolio Discovery and Planning) of the migration process, where the environments, inter-dependencies and what will be prioritized in the migration are determined.

The complexity of migration varies, depending heavily on the existing architecture and licensing. While a service-oriented architecture has low complexity, a monolithic mainframe is certain to bring high complexity. The figure below summarizes the 6R’s:

Rehosting (“lift-and-shift”): there are no changes in architecture. It is the redeployment of the application in a different hardware environment (in the cloud). This changes the configuration of the application infrastructure.
Replatforming: the architecture hasn’t changed yet, but there are optimizations in the Cloud to get benefits. For example, database migration to a database as a service platform, such as Amazon RDS.
Repurchasing: moving to a different product (usually in SaaS), such as a CRM for SFDC.
Refactoring / Re-architecting: changes in development and architecture practices, using native resources in the Cloud, which provides the infrastructure for the execution of your application.
Remove: discover what is no longer used in your environment and that can be disabled, and thus focus the team’s attention on applications that bring benefits to the business.
Revisit: do nothing (for now). This happens in applications that have been updated recently or that do not make sense to migrate for now.

Stages of adoption

AWS has a set of stages that describe the attitude associated with organizations in Cloud adoption. There are four stages:

Stage 1 — Project: starts with some projects to understand how the cloud will meet the needs of the business. Uses experimentation in early cloud projects, POCs, TCO / ROI analysis and risk / security preparation.
Stage 2 — Foundation: with the perception of the initial benefits, the company can scale the adoption throughout the organization. The recommendation is to create a CCoE (Cloud Center of Excellence), responsible for training / qualifying employees, cost and asset management, hybrid architecture strategy, reference architecture, among others.
Stage 3 — Migration: the migration strategy is then defined, usually started with the application discovery process and a business case, followed by individual migrations (in several different migration strategies).
Stage 4 — Optimization: many companies find it easier to optimize their applications after migrating them to the cloud. At this stage there is automated infrastructure and management of the solutions stack.

Migration Process

The readiness and planning for migration involves work streams that operate in the areas of Landing Zone, Operational Model, Governance, Security & Compliance, People (skills), Application Portfolio, Migration Process and Business Case.

With the use of methodology, processes, tools and resources, a migration objective is defined, generally evaluated in 3 to 4 months of work (structured in Sprints). During this phase, the teams carry out initial migrations to create experience and confidence through quick wins. The main deliverable for preparing for migration are:

Landing Zones: setting up a secure environment for multiple accounts.
CCoE (Cloud Center of Excellence) / Cloud Operations Model: adequate training and qualification for teams. Determine operating practices to maximize business benefits.
Security and Compliance: resolution of gaps and implementation of security and compliance practices.
Discovery and Migration Portfolio: sequencing and planning of migrations.

CONCLUSION

The use of Cloud Services is a very strategic enabler to be considered in your digital transformation plan or digital strategy. There are several migration strategies, as we know the difficulty in keeping the core services (not always created with the best practices) in operation and the cost that this decision can cause in the creation of new products for the company.

Choosing a good partner is essential to support the Cloud adoption journey. This journey requires specialized skills, both in the knowledge of the business and applications of the company itself, as well as in Cloud technologies. In addition, good governance is essential to enable the migration and readiness plan and ensure, together with the team, that the objectives will be achieved.

Finally, check the benefits and real applicability in your environment. Financial analysis, such as TCO (Total cost of ownership), is also important to support your decisions. What are the opportunity and operational costs of maintaining applications or services in the current environment? Is it possible to be innovative in this scenario? Have you evaluated any PoC? Are the features that most generate revenue for the business well planned (cost x return)? Are there insights from the use of collected data? What about application monitoring and security?