From the Cloud Face · 2016-03-03 · To underline these points, when Zespri International, one of the world’s most successful horticultural marketing companies, moved all of its

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DATACOM INTELLIGENCE

WHITE PAPERIssued: October 20th 2013

Datacom Group Limited | All content © Datacom 2016 | Available for release on request

#3W H I T E PA P E R

DATACO M I N T E L L I G E N C E

ISSUED February 2016

From theCloud Face:Ten Lessons on Adoption and Management

3 www.datacom.co.nz | www.datacom.com.au

Datacom White Paper | L e s s o n s f r o m t h e C l o u d F a c e

Introduction

With any adoption of cloud, changes to technology, people and processes will be necessary to reap the rewards on off er. The nature and scale of these changes will depend on the approach to cloud your organisation takes.

The same can be said for the introduction of any other new technology, of course, but cloud – especially public cloud – is potentially revolutionary in what it can do for your organisation, and therefore demands and deserves special care and attention.

Datacom has learned this from working for years on many diff erent cloud projects – involving public, private and hybrid clouds – for a diverse range of organisations across the Asia-Pacifi c region. We have worked successfully with customers at all stages of the planning process, including mapping out the cloud transition plan, and beyond. We have supported or managed both adoption and the ongoing running of whatever clouds or other environments are best suited to the organisation.

This paper contains ten lessons, based on our extensive experience at the ‘cloud face’, that are critical to the successful adoption and management of cloud.



As per Datacom’s white paper, Defi ning the Right Cloud Strategy and Plan for Your Organisation (Jan 2016), fi nding the right approach to cloud is crucial to maximising the benefi ts of its adoption. Whether you are contemplating a full-scale digital transformation; leaving legacy IT where it is for now and taking a cloud-fi rst approach to new applications; or doing something in between, it’s always better to have a strategy and plan of some kind to work from than none at all.

Building the best cloud strategy and plan for your organisation involves asking what, why, where and when questions that focus on the business as well as technology.

This means starting with your organisation’s business strategy and objectives, then considering the IT services required to help achieve them, and how cloud may support or deliver these services better than the status quo. Consider every service to be delivered and work through them methodically.

This allows organisations to make technical and commercial decisions about what cloud solution(s), if any, fi t best, in the context of supporting desired business outcomes. From this you can work out the transition plan, which would ideally cover:

• the current and planned business services and the IT that supports or delivers them;

• the recommended new locations for workloads;

• what’s to be lifted and shifted, redesigned, rebuilt, developed from scratch or accessed via PaaS or SaaS; and

• what’s required when to make the move successfully, including requisite business changes, people and processes.

By assessing your business readiness for cloud transition and identifying any associated constraints or risks in your migration plan, you will have done the all-important groundwork to enable you to keep costs down while you move to the cloud. It will also give you a business mandate based on quantifi able evidence that takes people, processes and technology into account.

1. The importance ofstrategy and planning



It’s important to understand from the outset, if you don’t already, that moving to cloud isn’t necessarily a matter of lifting and shifting workloads into the new environment. It depends on the cloud and what you want to achieve.

For private cloud lifting and shifting may be the right approach. These environments are usually based on VMware or Microsoft technology. Often the place you are moving the workload to is similar enough to the place you are lifting it from for a simple lift and shift to work. And the workloads or applications themselves may operate in the same way, not requiring much, if any, remediation. In some cases therefore the move is essentially a file copying process, once the necessary networking components are in place.

For example, many organisations have at least one legacy application that runs on a specific unit – a COBOL application on iSeries, for instance. This is unlikely to suit moving to public cloud. A private cloud, such as Datacom Cloud Services (DCS), would be a better home.

The potential benefits of this approach include lower transition costs and a more predictable outcome compared with public cloud. An obvious drawback of lifting and shifting to private cloud is that nothing new is being delivered – but that may be the intention for the particular application.

2. It’s not justlifting and shifting

Moving workloads to public cloud is another matter, for a number of reasons. The public cloud environment is a different proposition to private cloud, and the operation of the application may need to be different to take advantage of the benefits of this hyper-scale environment. Basically, if you lift and shift 100 servers into AWS or Azure you are likely to bring all of the baggage and get none of the benefits. That’s why, as Datacom has found, around 70% of workloads in the average public cloud migration project need to be replatformed, redesigned or rebuilt rather than lifted and shifted.

There are obviously transition costs attached to such change, as well as additional risk and effort. Issues such as potential licensing restrictions for applications moving to public cloud (as outlined in Datacom’s paper, Before You Go Public, Read This (Oct 2015)) may arise. However, these sit alongside the many benefits that public cloud can deliver, including greater flexibility, scalability and agility. The move can also serve as a catalyst for organisations to reassess and reconfigure their application portfolio – putting the business in a better long-term position. For example, they may decide to outsource payroll and CRM applications using SaaS.

To underline these points, when Zespri International, one of the world’s most successful horticultural marketing companies, moved all of its IT to public cloud to enhance global operations, make expansion into new markets easier, reduce risk and improve disaster recovery, Datacom had to put SAP and many other applications in Azure. To do this successfully, Datacom rebuilt, from the ground up, the company’s entire infrastructure and interconnections in public cloud, including 300 servers in total initially. Only a handful of these were lifted and shifted.



3. No application is an island

Interconnectedness is a critical, but sometimes overlooked, consideration in any cloud move. What are the implications of moving diff erent parts of an application or system, especially legacy IT, to cloud? For example, if you have an application that talks to a database server, then moving the latter to cloud may have a negative impact on the application’s performance.

Or, if an organisation stretches certain components by running them in public cloud, what is the impact on other components? SAP, for instance, can run in public or private cloud, but it doesn’t run in isolation, so getting the connections with databases and other relevant systems right is critical to its operation.

According to Datacom customer research outlined in Before You Go Public, Read This, currently, and in the foreseeable future, few organisations will go ‘all in’ to public cloud like Zespri, and will therefore retain some of their workloads on premise or in private cloud. Many services are, and will be, delivered via applications or workloads with a hybrid set up.

Trans-Tasman media company, Fairfax, for instance, wanted a unifi ed web portal that would allow customers to self-manage subscriptions and deliveries. The nature of the membership portal, and the inconsistent and spikey demand for it from users, meant that it was ideally suited to a public cloud environment.

So Datacom designed the portal to take advantage of the elasticity inherent in public cloud, and built it to run in AWS. The front-end was integrated with the customer database and legacy system in Fairfax’s data centres in Australia and New Zealand – all via Datacom’s dedicated hybrid cloud link. Customers now have a seamless, high quality experience regardless of the demands placed on the system.

Hybrid cloud architecture requires careful management and planning to account for key factors such as latency, security and compliance, as well as potential added complexity and transition costs. Datacom’s software and integration teams have extensive experience in application refresh and modifi cation for any type of IT environment, and delivering the project and change management required. We also help customers to make informed decisions on portfolio planning, taking a consultative, technology-independent approach to answering the what, where, when, how and who of cloud transition and management.



Considering cloud means looking at how others may be able to deliver services better than you can. For this, it’s important to look across SaaS and PaaS as well as IaaS. For example, with HR services, a SaaS package may be the best way to deliver the required functionality to users. A new web service may not require new infrastructure at all, but could be run on PaaS.

The key thing, as emphasised in the first lesson, is taking the time to work out what’s provided by various cloud options and comparing it to the status quo in the context of functional and technical requirements.

This is not necessarily an all or nothing decision. PaaS or SaaS may be able to deliver 80% of what’s required for a service. In this case, consider what else you need. It may make sense to build new what’s also required to make the service complete, stand up the SaaS application, and integrate the two in a hybrid set up.

Remember that tried and true SaaS and PaaS offerings have been tested and stretched to their limits by other organisations – perhaps much larger and more demanding than yours. And in some cases integrating SaaS into your business’s IT and processes may be simpler, less risky and less expensive than building and integrating your own solution or service from the ground up.

4. Standing on the shouldersof cloud giants



An agile approach to public cloud for the uninitiated – ideally within the parameters of a thought-through cloud strategy and plan – is running a PoC. This allows the organisation to assess the pros and cons of diff erent public cloud environments – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS – from a business and technical perspective, test-drive specifi c features and functions, and determine what it takes to get the most out of them. Assuming all goes well with the PoC, other applications or workloads can be weighed up.

For example, Foodstuff s, the NZ-owned cooperative of food stores and distribution centres, came to Datacom to build a PoC of an ordering system that would replace some legacy outlying processes and technologies to deliver end to end supply chain effi ciencies. The organisation wanted to build functionality that enabled, among other things, live information on pricing and promotions. Datacom built the solution in AWS and integrated it with Foodstuff s’ product database. Following the successful PoC and further development, Foodstuff s rolled out the solution to pilot sites.

Transition also involves coordinating with other parts of the business to do, for example, application regression testing and platform testing. This needs to be managed carefully – another reason why starting with a PoC works for many organisations.

Of course, many organisations will already be using SaaS applications for various functions – with or without the knowledge or approval of the IT department. Such deployments can be treated as PoCs in themselves, if they aren’t already, and included in the overall cloud strategy and plan.

5. The power of aProof of Concept



Managing services, applications and workloads in a cloud environment is different to on premise. Not better or worse, just different. These differences are more marked in public cloud, but apply to private cloud and hybrid cloud as well. So getting people ready for the cloud journey is as important as preparing the strategy and plan and working on the technology.

A move to public cloud especially will most likely change the nature of some people’s jobs – which may have been performed the same way for many years. Some functions will stay the same, some will transform, and some may disappear. (Some may of course be passed on to a service provider.)

For example, some tasks that system admins have been doing for twenty years will need to change with public cloud. Take server outages: traditionally seen as a problem to be investigated or rectified in on premise or even highly virtualised environments. Many monitoring toolsets raise alerts at outages and trigger processes aimed at rectification. But in a public cloud environment, where machines may be switched off anytime when they are not needed to provide a service, this set up needs to be amended.

Even if a workload does cause an issue in this environment, it can be readily destroyed and a new one redeployed in its place. This action can be logged for review in the morning rather than cause a major alert. In this context, the traditional mindset of a server down always equating to a serious issue needs to be updated, along with the related processes.

So people will need to reskill and think differently to ensure successful cloud service delivery. This need may be reduced if much of the management is outsourced to a third party, but there will always be a learning curve of some kind required to ensure the business can make the most of its partner’s or partners’ services and support.

Note that there is often understandable resistance to these changes. Change management is therefore a crucial aspect of any transition to cloud and a key consideration to build into cloud strategy and planning. As part of the transition stage of cloud adoption, we spend time with customers to explain what is to change operationally, from a people and process perspective.

6. Change managementis mission-critical



The positive flipside of all the challenging change discussed above is the huge opportunity for individuals and organisations alike to be empowered and prosper in the cloud era.

For example, with public cloud in particular comes much potential automation of traditionally manual processes. The same can be said of private cloud or even traditional environments, of course, but these kinds of systems by definition have limits that public cloud does not. Nevertheless, with any cloud environment, automation of processes is an important reason why it offers more benefit to an organisation than legacy infrastructure.

For example, the server destroying and re-deploying process described above can in fact be wholly automated, with no manual intervention necessary to maintain the service. This mentality of coding and automating is another mindset shift that people need to make to get the most out of cloud.

More automation means that a single engineer may be able to manage 300-400 virtual machines instead of many fewer. It also means that they can focus less on servers, as such, and more on what they deliver. That is, they can get more involved in higher value activities, such as capacity planning and service management and delivery. As automation progresses, these same engineers may become more strategic and powerful in terms of the scale and importance of what they oversee and control.

Automation and the related standardisation of processes are also key to speeding up application release cycles and making development in an organisation a leaner, more agile and more iterative process – compared with the traditional ‘waterfall’ project-based approach. For the Fairfax membership portal, for instance, Datacom took a lean development approach to build a minimum viable product (MVP), make it available as early as possible, and iterate from that over time. The release cycle was accelerated without any negative impact on end users or the business.

Furthermore, automation goes hand in hand with the acceleration and other enhancements of business processes that cloud enables. It’s also key to managing the integration that becomes increasingly necessary as an organisation’s use of cloud extends and matures.

7. Harness the powerof automation



With greater adoption of cloud usually comes a corresponding service orientation and increasing focus on business outcomes enabled by cloud. These outcomes may include risk or reputation management, reducing cost and making key services available when needed and at a suitable quality. They are often delivered through the aggregation of multiple providers, services and solutions – and various SLAs.

Making these outcomes happen and managing the many moving parts involved is therefore an important function, which organisations can take on themselves or outsource, at least in part, to a qualified partner like Datacom. Whatever the approach taken, there is a growing need for those involved in cloud service delivery to understand the way different clouds and related services interact and how they can be integrated – with each other and with other environments and types of IT.

In this context, a core new skill required is commercial management. Such skills are important when considering the terms and conditions of different cloud environments; licensing issues; whether you get software upgrades if the application is in public cloud; disaster recovery procedures; and how to return services, applications and data from public cloud back to the business, if required. Also, with potentially mission-critical business functions running in public cloud, it’s beneficial for your organisation – or your technology partner at least – to have a productive working and commercial relationship with the cloud provider.

8. The need for businessand commercial acumen



As highlighted above, to realise the compelling benefits of cloud – especially public cloud – it’s not just technology that needs to change. People and processes need to alter to support and exploit faster, more flexible and more agile IT.

For example, a business may want improve time-to-market by speeding up previously month-long release cycles into weekly cycles using public cloud. This needs to happen, however, without losing requisite standards, discipline, compliance and life cycle and financial management. In a nutshell, this means speeding up without breaking the business – finding a balance.

To make this happen, among other key changes:

• infrastructure people need to pare back normal ITIL-based processes and related standards somewhat to allow faster activity without losing too much risk mitigation and rigour; and

• developers need to work faster than ever, but wrapped in enough protection and control to avoid disaster.

9. Take a DevOps approachto speed up withoutbreaking the business

A key challenge is that there is an historic divide between operations and development people and processes. But to get the most out of cloud, it’s important to integrate these areas as much as possible. That’s why Datacom usually recommends that organisations adopt a DevOps approach, at least to a degree.

And we practise what we preach. Our Managed Cloud Service (DevOps) merges ITIL and Agile methodologies to drive an outcome-based service while maintaining enterprise standards, governance and compliance. Our consulting, infrastructure and development teams use the same tools for many of the jobs we do that are related to cloud.



The dynamic described above – between accelerating without breaking and between developing at pace and maintaining discipline – also manifests in the form of bimodal IT, a typical characteristic of organisations that adopt cloud in a significant way.

In the bimodal model – first described by analysts at Gartner – Mode 1 refers to more traditional IT, in which reliability, security, accuracy and efficiency is emphasised. Support needs may be more traditional as well, and be geared towards continual uptime and static demands on the infrastructure.

Mode 2 emphasises speed and agility, and may be non-sequential. Workloads to manage are more likely to be transient and hyper-scale, such as campaign-based activity and development/testing. Utility pricing and complete flexibility to switch on or off are also typical.

Mode 1 elegantly describes commonplace traits of on premise, legacy IT, and Mode 2 speaks of public cloud.

The implications of running and managing bimodal IT and its attendant cloud services and solutions boil down to this: no ‘one size fits all’ approach will work for any organisation. A balance is needed that must be adjusted as you go. The management needs to reflect the

10. Find the right mixof cloud support

flexibility of the platform while maintaining due process and governance, and be aligned to the ultimate goal of meeting business objectives.

That’s why if you’re adopting or using cloud it’s important to have the right people, processes and technology in place, and/or to look for managed service providers, such as Datacom, who can deliver skilled support that is suitably flexible to account for Mode 1 and 2, and potentially available in long- and short-term engagements.

As a service aggregation partner, we work closely with customers, as well as the various software providers, development teams, cloud providers and operational staff, to provide an end-to-end managed cloud service specific to their business, while bolstering continuous integration/continuous delivery practices, continuous service improvement and innovation practices.

If you’d like more information on Datacom’s services and solutions relevant to the areas outlined in this paper, please go to datacom.co.nz/cloud or datacom.com.au/cloud. To discuss any of the key points of this paper in more detail, or for more information, please get in touch at [email protected].

Datacom Group Limited | All content © Datacom 2016 | Available for release on request

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From the Cloud Face · 2016-03-03 · To underline these points, when Zespri International, one of the world’s most successful horticultural marketing companies, moved all of its