What you need to know about multicloud adoption

Organizations want to make the most of their cloud investments, but not all applications are cloud-ready. Here's what to consider when migrating to the cloud.

With 90% of organizations claiming success with their multicloud strategy, according to a 2022 HashiCorp survey, it’s time to shift our attention from whether an enterprise should embrace multicloud to how to effectively do so. As with any relatively new corner of technology, the problem and opportunity is people. That is, today there’s a dearth of multicloud talent, but there are ways around this relatively short-term issue.

Benefits to multicloud adoption

Though multicloud used to be more aspirational than real, today’s enterprises are multicloud by default. The reasons aren’t hard to guess: A multicloud strategy enables an enterprise to pick the best cloud service for their particular needs. So they might look to Google Cloud for their machine learning services, AWS for serverless and Microsoft to seamlessly connect to their existing Windows investments.

Though companies will cite a desire to evade lock-in as a key reason for multicloud, in practice this is hardly the most compelling reason, given that it’s precisely each cloud’s particular strengths that enterprises should embrace to drive innovation. For years AWS would — rightly, in my view — pillory the idea that smart cloud strategy involved sticking to the most basic primitives to ensure cross-cloud compatibility. By contrast, today’s enterprise is happy to pick a particular cloud provider to match their application needs, which will differ from application to application.

Yes, along the way organizations establish independence from their vendors. But you needn’t to evenly distribute services across clouds to avoid undue concentration in any one cloud. Given how quickly the clouds roll out new, innovative services, there will always be a rich variety of services to help organizations meet their application needs.

Challenges associated with multicloud adoption

Whatever the benefits, stiff challenges exist. Foremost among these is people. For years it has been difficult to find sufficient talent to staff corporate cloud projects, and multicloud exacerbates this. There simply aren’t many people that are proficient in more than one cloud provider.

In fact, as revealed in the HashiCorp survey, a talent shortage is the number one inhibitor to multicloud success (Figure A).

Figure A

It’s unlikely things will remain this way, however, given corporate demands and personal ambition. Beyond simply padding one’s resume, multicloud awareness offers real opportunity for an IT professional’s employer.

“More than just helping you absorb new information faster, understanding the strengths and tradeoffs of different cloud providers can help you make the best choice of services and architectures for new projects,” said Forrest Brazeal, head of content for Google Cloud.

So, yes, there’s a talent shortage in the cloud, and it’s even worse for enterprises hoping to succeed with multicloud. More clouds, with fewer people that understand how to translate between the diverse tools and workflows of particular clouds, means that succeeding with multicloud is far from automatic. Still, organizations are finding clever ways to circumvent this issue.

How to implement multicloud adoption

As the HashiCorp survey found, “the top approach to solving this conundrum is to standardize on a common cloud operating model — a set of common tools and automated workflows chosen and enforced by platform teams leveraging the most skilled personnel.” I’ve written before about similar platform-oriented approaches, and how they give developers a paved path to building applications.

Enterprises shouldn’t want their developers having to learn the nuances of how AWS or Azure implement security. Every minute they spend combing through those docs is a minute they’re not building more innovative applications. Platform teams can take the lead on figuring out such nuances and give developers “a standard, pre-approved environment in which the effort to create an app from an idea is minimal, [developers can] focus on innovation not plumbing,” as Weaveworks CEO Alexis Richardson has explained.

Which is why such platform teams top the list in Hashicorp’s survey (Figure B).

Figure B

Image: HashiCorp.

Such platform teams take on the heavy lifting of figuring out which cloud offers the best tools for a particular workload. It’s on these teams that the multicloud unicorns will exist. They’ll know, for example, whether Google’s GKE or AWS Lambda will be the best fit for the company and how to shave costs and boost performance with new chip architectures.

Part of this platform approach is to embrace tooling that is already multicloud. A variety of SaaS providers, like Confluent for data streaming, offer out-of-the-box multicloud architecture. Such services don’t complete a multicloud platform journey, but they offer a significant head start. For example, though a database multicloud service won’t take care of architecting your application tier for multicloud, it does remove an otherwise difficult task of managing multicloud for the data tier. Platform teams can effectively manage multicloud complexity across the different tiers of their workloads.

Over time, multicloud expertise will grow within organizations. Employees will move between companies, and even within a particular organization, skills upgrades happen incrementally on an as-needed basis. Platform teams can provide a much-needed bridge to this time when we’re all multicloud by both choice and necessity.

Courtesy: https://www.techrepublic.com/

How cloud is redirecting technology career paths

Cloud isn't just an in-demand skill -- it is changing the nature of tech responsibilities. 'The IT skillset has evolved to support modernization.'

There's been plenty of discussion about the new types of skills needed to get into the cloud computing game. But the impact on current technology professionals' roles and responsibilities has also been undergoing a significant shift as well. 

Cloud isn't just an in-demand skill -- it is changing the nature of tech responsibilities, industry observers agree. "It has enabled IT roles to focus on efficiencies with provisioning system resources, by allocating only what the task requires and eliminating wasted resources often seen in physical bare-metal deployments," says Ryan Renner, senior associate at Schellman. "Cloud computing virtualizes what was once physical hardware and offers hosted implementation models such as software-defined networking, microservices, container technologies like Kubernetes and Docker, and Infrastructure as a Service." 

IT tasks are elevating, as "many tedious and time-consuming manual tasks like data entry, system and application monitoring and some app development efforts will be taken over by technology solutions," says Scott duFour, global CIO at FLEETCOR. Developers can also "use low-code and no-code tools to get past the basic, remedial process of application development so they can focus on more critical work like building innovative new products or solving problems with the app itself."  

IT "is increasingly relied upon to support companies' migration to the cloud -- for example, moving from on-prem solutions to cloud-based applications, which are increasingly offered as Software-as-a-Service solutions," says Sudhir Mehta, global vice president of transformation solutions at Lexmark International. "The IT skillset has evolved to support this modernization, moving from a capital to an OPEX model, and it requires a variety of technical skills with focus on utilization and scaling capabilities throughout the process."  

While cloud models aren't entirely different in concept, their management, maintenance, and deployment methods look different, Renner says. "In enterprise environments, IT professionals see code repositories with instructions that can deploy and build out an entire network infrastructure at the click of a button or automation that triggers by a defined metric," he says. "From a logical security perspective, cloud computing offers the ability to segment environments at the network level down to the service level where containers and microservices support a specific function or application. Understanding these cloud functions and implementing them securely is a critical and valuable skill in any IT admins kit."    

There are roles or skills that will become more prominent as lower-level tasks are supplanted, duFour points. "As technology continues marching forward and people work remotely or in a hybrid environment, the human touch will become increasingly valuable - it's going to be important to develop soft skills. Thinking critically is innately human and even as AI, automation and other technology have and will replace lower-level tasks, it's essential to use logic, reason and emotion to dream up innovative solutions."   

"Modernization is not a lift and shift," Mehta says. "You need IT professionals to chart the journey step-by-step and developer teams to focus on building and supporting new cloud-native applications." The emphasis, he adds, moves to "leveraging the full capabilities of a cloud solution employing microservices, DevSecOps and modern cloud architecture. At the same time, IT must also have resources to keep the core business running while the transition takes place and to ensure the user experience is seamless and gets better eventually."

Courtesy: ZDNet.com

As cloud costs spiral upward, enterprises turn to a thing called FinOps

Organizations waste 32% of cloud spend, up from 30% a year ago. 'More and more users are swimming in the FinOps side of the pool, even if they may not know it - or call it FinOps yet.'

In the first few years of cloud computing, cost savings was the driving reason for adopting the cloud. Nowadays, however, businesses are faced with spiraling cloud costs. There's even a word for the emerging process to deal with it: "FinOps."

According to Flexera's recently released 2022 State of the Cloud Report, organizations continue to waste significant cloud spending, based on survey responses from 753 global cloud decision-makers and users. 66% of executives said cloud usage is "higher than initially planned this year," They estimated that their organizations waste 32% of cloud spend, up from 30% in last year's survey. 

In addition, "spend is likely less efficient and likely even higher on average, as many organizations tend to underestimate their amount of waste," the survey's authors report. In addition, respondents said their public cloud spend was over budget by an average of 13% for the previous year. They expect their cloud spend to further increase by 29% in the next twelve months. 

Among small to medium businesses, 53% are now spending $1.2 million annually on cloud computing, up from 38%in 2021. While the survey's authors do not provide a similar composite spending figure for larger enterprises, they report that many spend $12 million or more annually on selected public cloud services -- 18% of enterprises spend this on AWS, 15% spend this on Microsoft Azure, and 7% on Google Cloud Platform.

So there is a lot of money being poured into cloud services. A lot of the monthly subscription bills are likely going to a raft of unused or underused services for which no one is really able to account. Someone in some department signed on to a cloud instance to run some tests three years ago abandoned it, and the company still keeps paying for its usage. 

Enter FinOps. This practice is intended to help organizations get maximum business value from the cloud "by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions," according to the FinOps Foundation. (Yes, there's now even an entire foundation devoted to the practice.)  In many cases, they are practicing the art of FinOps without even calling it that. Respondents are actively involved in the ongoing usage and cost management for both SaaS (69%) and public cloud IaaS and PaaS (66%). "More and more users are swimming in the FinOps side of the pool, even if they may not know it -- or call it FinOps yet," the Flexera survey's authors state.

In addition, for the sixth year in a row, "optimizing the existing use of cloud is the top initiative for all respondents, underscoring the need for FinOps teams or similar ways to improve cost savings initiatives," they also note.

While the survey doesn't explicitly ask about FinOps adoption, the authors also state that some organizations have organized FinOps teams to assist in evaluating cloud computing metrics and value. (A specific percentage is not provided.) They also observe that "for the sixth year in a row, optimizing the existing use of cloud is the top initiative among 59%, followed by migrating more workloads to the cloud (57%).

The survey's authors appear very optimistic about what the cloud can do to boost the value of technology to enterprises: "As organizations move more workloads to the cloud, they can retire the technical debt associated with maintaining and operating traditional data centers," they state. (We'll have to check back on that one, right?)

What are organizations doing to better understand and keep a lid on cloud costs? Close to two-thirds, 64%, focus on maximizing resource utilization, while 50% engage in deleting or removing unused or idle resources. This means that half of the respondents are not actively reviewing cloud services for which they pay a monthly fee. 

Another 41% look into provider discounts such as reserved instances. Another 39% are pursuing a pure FinOps approach: employing the unit economics model, considered a key component of the FinOps disciple. (Unit economics, as explained by Apptio's Andrew Midgley, is "the average revenue or costs, or the margin, directly associated with a specific unit delivered by an organization.") As illustrated at the FinOps foundation site, "for a customer-facing application, that unit might be a user or customer subscription; for an e-commerce platform, it might be a transaction; and for an airline, it might be a seat. By calculating cloud spend for total revenue, you can attach growth in cloud spending to your overall business growth. When these are in line, it makes sense that cloud spend isn't wasted. When cloud spend is growing faster than the business, there may be cause for concern."

Automation is a key tool for optimizing cloud costs, the survey shows. More than 40% of respondents are using automated policies to shut down workloads after hours and to rightsize underutilized instances. Another 33% are using automated policies to implement required tags, while 43% still perform this labor-intensive process manually. 

While at least half of IT executives recognize the value cloud is bringing to the business, the prime measure of success is still cost savings. This is likely the easiest and most demonstrable pitch to the C-level and board. Speed to market is also a highly tangible benefit and thus also ranks high as a success metric. Innovation and competitive advantage resulting from cloud flexibility are perhaps the most long-term advantages of a cloud-based enterprise but are a bit squishier in terms of metrics. The following are the top metrics for assessing progress against cloud goals identified in the survey:

• Cost efficiency/savings: 74%
• Delivery speed of new products/services: 68%
• Increased speed of innovation: 48%
• Value delivered to business units: 47%
• Increase in competitive advantage: 47%
• Number of workloads migrated: 45%
• Retirement/decrease of technical debt: 37%

As is obvious from the survey, FinOps is still an emerging way of operating in the cloud that has not yet been well defined. The following are principles formulated by the FinOps Foundation to help bring clarity to the roles involved and purpose of the practice. 

Teams need to collaborate

• Finance moves at the speed and granularity of IT
• Engineering considers cost as a new efficiency metric
• Continuously improve your practice to gain efficiency and innovation
• Define governance and controls for cloud usage

Everyone takes ownership for their cloud usage

• Empower feature and product teams to manage their own usage of cloud against their budget
• Gain visibility into cloud spend at all levels
• Track team-level targets to drive accountability

A centralized team drives FinOps

• Centrally govern and control Committed Use Discounts, Reserved Instances, and Volume/Custom Discounts with Cloud Providers
• Centralized discount buying process removes rate negotiations from engineering team consideration
• Granular allocation of all costs, direct or shared, to the teams and cost centers responsible for them

Reports should be accessible and timely

• Fast feedback loops result in more efficient behavior
• Visibility helps determine if resources are under- or over-provisioned
• Automation of resources drives continuous improvement

Decisions are driven by business value of cloud

• Trending and variance analysis helps to understand why costs increased
• Internal team benchmarking drives best practices and celebrates wins
• Industry peer-level benchmarking determines how your company is performing

Take advantage of the variable cost model of the cloud

• Rightsizing instances and services help drive appropriate resourcing levels
• Comparing pricing between services and resource types drives better decisions

Courtesy: ZDNet

How the cloud can make supply chains greener

 Aside from net-zero datacentres, cloud computing can do more to tackle climate change by addressing emissions created along global supply chains

Greening of the cloud is happening at pace, shifting computing en masse to remote datacentres powered by renewables. However, energy consumption is just one part of the picture. In the lead up to COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, later this year in Glasgow, attention is being directed at the cloud’s ability to drive greater sustainability in supply chains

The focus is on data and lots of it. When it’s organised and analysed on the cloud, via a single, uniform platform, organisations can start to reconfigure how they do business in a more environmentally friendly way. This can be achieved by driving efficiencies, fine-tuning logistics and transport routes, as well as by using natural resources. 

“Sustainable supply chains aren’t driven by technology, they’re enabled by technology,” explains Mark Griffiths, global head of climate business at WWF. “Cloud-based technologies enable near real-time visibility, as well as greater accountability.”

The World Wide Fund for Nature isn’t the only organisation involved. Unilever has teamed up with Google Cloud to fight deforestation and source sustainable commodities, particularly palm oil. The idea is to connect satellite images of forested and deforested areas with data on suppliers, to make sure Unilever is buying products from reputable partners. The cloud acts as the ultimate ledger for such activity.

“Transparency, data analytics and better decision-making is the cloud’s unique selling point when it comes to sustainability,” says Vishal Patel, vice president at Ivalua, a procurement software provider. 

“Then there’s the ability to monitor and track suppliers. Procurement can help drive green initiatives by selecting and rewarding companies for sustainable practices. This is done by validating environmental impact data from suppliers and tracking them against sustainability goals. Cloud-based procurement tools can certainly help identify these opportunities.”

Data and supply chain visibility are stumbling blocks

The cloud as a force for green good in the lead up to the biggest climate summit since the Paris Agreement sounds remarkable, but there are challenges. Data and visibility along supply chains is notoriously difficult to achieve if they stretch between Glasgow, Gurugram and Guangzhou, involving many data silos and tiers of suppliers, who now have to adopt cloud solutions. There’s a lot of inertia. 

“Climate change is a big challenge for organisations, with effects that are far reaching, but addressing these is a long-term and more iterative process, so investment usually takes longer to prove its worth. It can be difficult for such investments to gain buy-in,” says David Basson, UK manufacturing lead at Fujitsu. 

Cloud is more likely to be deployed as a supply chain solution because it creates efficiencies, reduces lead times and allows companies to respond, adapt and act faster, saving them money and time. Some of these wins could be future sustainability wins too. 

“The cloud helps companies build a common infrastructure. Once supply chain partners adopt this, it gives them the foundation to evolve and adapt to any new challenge; this includes climate change,” Dan Martines, managing director at BCG Platinion, points out. 

Cloud also provides an agile, just-in-time, elastic environment that is easy to configure for supply chains. It’s cheaper to build, with recognised standards and off-the-shelf tools as well as data services. This is likely to drive its adoption when it comes to sustainability. 

“Arguably you could deliver the same systems out of the cloud to trace upstream and downstream value chains for sustainability. The challenge is the complexity of doing this,” says Grant Caley, chief technology officer (CTO) for UK and Ireland at NetApp.

“For instance, data from operational technologies can be combined with transportation internet of things sensor information and then cleaned with data services in the cloud, before running this against artificial intelligence (AI) models. This is then used as the basis to build cloud-based value-chain applications. The cloud makes all this a lot easier, more cost effective and accessible.” 

Another driver will be government procurement, as adoption of cloud-based solutions that drive sustainability are being championed by the public sector, which is increasingly aware of emissions and the race to net zero. The cloud offers transparency and accountability when it comes to the public purse. 

“Government requires sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues to be addressed as part of procurement. This is happening in local government where up to 5 per cent of an evaluation could be assigned to this. We regularly see the CSR aspect of bids given equal weighting to technical functionality. The result is that it has become a core part of any offer,” says Nick Cobley, managing director of cloud at Agilisys. 

New cloud-based tools deliver change

The cloud can be leveraged to generate sustainable supply chains in many industries, yet some represent more opportunities than others, such as manufacturing, retail and energy. There are also easy gains within sectors such as greener logistics. This has come to light during COVID lockdowns. 

“Retailers have been collaborating with each other and acting more intelligently over the last mile, cutting their emissions as well as delivery costs and fulfilment processes. Without the flexibility the cloud offers, they would not be able to re-engineer their supply chains quickly enough to take advantage of this kind of opportunity,” says Matt Waldbusser, global field CTO at Blue Yonder.

AI and machine learning can also assist in generating more sustainable supply chains, since these technologies can be articulated on the cloud more easily, joining the data dots and providing new levels of insight, such as reducing overstocking or solving complex logistical issues. 

“Amazon is a good example. It’s not surprising that an organisation with such strong cloud pedigree is connecting customers in-store directly into the supply chain through sensors, AI and the cloud. In the process they can make the entire supply chain more efficient and so more sustainable,” Alex Guillen, technology strategist at Insight, explains. 

There are also new cloud-based tools that are assisting the sustainability drive. Virtual digital twins are becoming more common. This allows companies to model, simulate and analyse more environmentally friendly concepts and hypotheses in the virtual world. Then apply them in real life.

“You can use a virtual twin to create an entire supply chain. The pharmaceutical and energy industries are now deploying this approach to offer more accurate data across their supply chains and reduce their carbon emissions and waste,” says John Kitchingman, managing director, EuroNorth, at Dassault Systèmes.

So what of the future? More cloud-based data will enable supply chains to be reconfigured. The hope is we will transition to a circular economy, moving away from a take, make, dispose linear model. That involves an ecosystem of partners, recalibrating how they interact, which is easier on the cloud. 

“This will be a destination for sustainable supply chains, where no net waste occurs in the produce and consume cycle. At the moment it’s being pushed in Europe and Japan, but its principles will soon be introduced in the United States,” says Dr Raj Agnihotri at IBM’s Global Supply Chain Center of Competence.

Certainly, the cloud now offers a window onto the art of the possible. “We are only limited by our imagination, prioritisation and drive to leverage the cloud in meaningful ways to help address our climate crisis,” Aaron Oser, leader of global sourcing at Pillsbury Law, sums up. 

Courtesy: https://www.raconteur.net/