Using the 3 S’s to influence operational behaviors and get better results
A few years ago, the IBM CIO organization recognized the opportunity to influence and create a strategic hybrid cloud platform. We were able to utilize our private AND public cloud to usher the transformation of thousands of legacy and on-premises applications.
As I approached leaders from different business units across IBM, scouting for the challenges they faced which impede their growth, I got consistent feedback that revolved around the following three main challenges:
- The speed to experiment with new technologies and being able to push new changes across platforms in a timely manner. Most of the solutions were based on a build it and forget it mindset.
- The scalability of on-premises architecture, and the scalability of their systems which was always costly, time-consuming, and labor-intensive.
- Most importantly, securing the infrastructure, middleware, and applications.
We fine-tuned our long-term hybrid cloud strategy based on the feedback from our consumers and the business direction. The build it and forget it mentality is a recipe for failure in the cloud era. Constant monitoring, re-evaluation, and being able to change the operational model to adapt to the new business needs is crucial for success. All of this leads to the importance of having a clear vision to implement a successful cloud strategy that leverages the benefits of what we’ll refer to as the “3 S’s”: speed, scale and security.
Speed
Many leaders in the enterprise use the speed of delivering products/services and cost avoidance as metrics to measure their cloud transformation progress. That’s why, more than ever, organizations require greater cloud agility, flexibility, and speed. This encourages them to experiment and adopt bleeding-edge technology.
We introduced a DevSecOps pipeline, and the speed to market time was improved. We integrated and orchestrated the development, operations, and security which gave power and speed to the developers to innovate and build solutions that were secure, stable, and easy for the IT operations group to deliver and maintain.
The most successful enterprises in the cloud era are those that are able to predict customer demands and quickly meet those demands. For example, Uber was able to dominate the transportation industry by providing a faster, easier way to order a ride.
Scale
Scale and cost are tightly coupled in any enterprise solution. To remain competitive, hybrid cloud provides the flexibility and seamless scalability to spin up resources on public and/or private cloud when they’re needed and spin down when they’re not. The rapid scalability of hybrid cloud can help to quickly align resources to meet new market demands while efficiently managing costs.
There are two ways to scale: vertically and horizontally. When you scale vertically, you add more CPU, memory, I/O resources, etc. When you scale horizontally, you are automatically adding or removing instances on-demand, which allows you to take full advantage of the hybrid cloud. With horizontal scaling, you can even span over public and private instances to get the best of both worlds.
Our hybrid cloud platform is in multiple availability zones/regions to allow horizontal auto-scaling of the entire application, including both compute and data resources across our entire platform. This empowers our development teams to build a cloud native application and to take full advantage of our hybrid cloud.
Security
Cloud security keeps a lot of executives up at night. If it’s done right, it can be more secure than an on-premises infrastructure. The most common reason for cloud breaches is cloud misconfiguration.
Security is always on our radar. It’s not an after-thought, rather, a continuous process to ensure that the platform and its workloads are secure at all times. In our hybrid cloud, we enforce operational discipline and implement infrastructure-as-code, which are the two main ingredients for cloud security. This ensures that it’s done rapidly, efficiently, and consistently.
To improve security and audit readiness, we treat our servers and their workloads like cattle rather than pets. This mindset helped to drastically improve our security posture. Our policy is to rebuild and redeploy applications at least once every two weeks. This ensures the running workload is using the latest, most secure images.
As a leader, you should consider hybrid cloud migration for your business not only for the sake of cost savings, but also as a catalyst for a transformational journey that enables your team to build cloud native applications. This journey can potentially position your business to speed up your growth, scale it as needed, while also assuring its security. Hybrid cloud gives your business the flexibility and adaptability to quickly respond to new business opportunities and be ahead of the game. It also gives you the opportunity to explore, fail fast, and fail forward. Having a hybrid cloud with all cloud services at your fingertips encourages innovation. You will be surprised with the new ideas your team will come up with based on experimenting with new technologies, as well as the partnership you will develop with your cloud consumers to build a platform that fits their needs and expectations.
Tamer Nassar is a Senior Technical Staff Member, Leader, and Master Inventor. He has led and owned multiple cloud initiatives. He is also an adjunct professor. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
