Walking an adaptable path to your cloud vision

While most companies have a vision of their cloud future – where everything in IT is simple, flexible, elastic making it easy to innovate, be swift to market and delight customers– fewhave a clear view of how to get there.This isbecause they are not just moving one simple business application to the cloud but many, most will need totake different paths at once. 

Need to get moving fast

With industries changing around them, the rapid arrival of new entrants and business models and increasing customer expectations, everyone must act now or face the risk of being ubered.No one is immune; you can’t just do what you have always done.Take that path at your peril for it typically leads to a Noah’s ark of a mess – where your infrastructure contains two of everything, with much of it coming from an era before things like blockchain, AI and IoT came to the fore.

No wonder the cost of keeping the lights on is estimated to consume at least 80 per cent of the IT budget, leaving little room for innovation.

So how do you get to the vision? There aresix simple paths that offer best practice depending on your starting point, goals and any barriers you face.

You need dramatic results, but cloud isn’t imminent

While you might want to decommission your datacentres, some workloads are not ready for cloud.There might bedata privacy regulations that limit a move, latency concerns, or right now it is just too hard based on the amount of customisations they feature.

Given that today’s decisions will affect tomorrow’s ability to move to a cloud model, rather than do nothing, start your journey by simplifyingyour existing IT so that it becomes ready to interoperate with or move to the public cloud.Consider converged infrastructure, where the compute, storage and networking elements are pre-built to work together minimising complexity and in some cases offering the best and most performant place to run workloads.

This will take out much of the complexity and cost of running IT infrastructure, offer dramatic improvements in performance, availability, security and efficiencyand require far fewer people.You can also start to adopt cloud consumption type models internally, preparing your mindset too!

Bringing the cloud home

Ultimately, most agree that the future is cloud.The trends and technologies driving business modernisation and digital transformation today—such as the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, artificial intelligence, and Big Data—require the data and processing power and speed of cloud. 

New cloud models are available that provide a cloud in a box, where a pre-packaged ‘cloud machine’ can just be dropped on your data centre floor giving you the promise of IT delivered as-a-Service delivered from behind your firewall, without the need to send your data out over the internet.

Some go as far as to mirror the public cloud in terms of the exact architecture, subscription, management and capability models, enabling the adoption of a true hybrid cloud model, where workloads can seamlessly shift back and forth.

Move and improve

For applications that are not tied to an on premises environment due to regulations, the next step is to move legacy workloads into the public cloud using infrastructure cloud services. 

This removes today’s IT capacity worries and enables users to focus on supporting new business opportunities by delivering elastic, scalable, secure,and cost-effective infrastructure in the cloud. Next generation IaaS makes migration straightforward and hassle-free, empowering IT leaders to move existing on-premises workloads quickly to the cloud or developers to conduct test and development without incurring additional costs or having to spend valuable time on application and architecture changes.

Break in to the new

For those companies that want to go one step further and accelerate the creation of new products and services for customers, employees, and partners, platform cloud services deliver capabilities never before imaginable.PaaS provides a platform to develop, deploy, and run applications without the cost and complexity of deploying and managing the required infrastructure.It empowers users to extend applications to incorporate mobile applications, intelligent chatbots, AI, IoT, blockchain, and built in analytics, integrate cloud services together, build and automate modern business processes, and include security right from the start.

Modernise and reimagine

For those wanting to modernise and reimagine their business, processes, and experiences, Software as a Service (SaaS) applications provide speed and innovation.Often embedded with modern, best-practice processes and built-in social, mobile, and analytic capabilities, cloud applications help deliver the experiences customers expect, the talent to succeed, and the performance the market demands.

Go all in

For new companies or brand new departments that have no legacy IT operation or applications, choosing a born-in-the-cloud model is the logical choice.

In each case, it is really horses for courses, with the each path selected being driven by need.That said, each journey must lead to the same end destination to fulfil the overarching business goals. It is essential then that cloud service selection should be made with this holistic view in mind with preference given to integrated suites to avoid the need for messy integration and to ensure maximum value from bringing in emerging technologies like AI and automation.

Final thoughts

At the end of the day, cloud migration is not simple; it requires planning, organisational buy-in, and comprehensive technology framework.Get it right and it will boost your business agility and innovation, giving your enterprise a significant competitive advantage.So don’t delay, get planning your pathways now!

The writer is Oracle’s Senior Vice President, Systems, Asia Pacific and Japan