Why your IT strategy has to rely on public Cloud first

Even organisations with advanced Cloud practices have a long way to go before becoming future-proof: serverless services, NoOps and Lego IT are tomorrow’s norms. Technologies may not be applicable as they are, but adopting today’s startups philosophies and models is difficult to do. In the near future, technological market trends will no longer be steered by heavy weight vendors like IBM or Oracle, but by GAFA building their end-user oriented products with a clear digital focus and a strong innovation drive. Adopting such innovative practices successfully cannot be reduced to a standalone technological evolution but is rather a 360° transformation.

Biased ideas against public cloud are no longer true

When considering going for Public Cloud, many companies face a set of platitudes which are not relevant anymore, the main 3 being costs, security and service quality.

Firstly, the issue of cost. Public Cloud costs are actually increasingly more competitive and continue to decrease due to the scale effect of giant Cloud Providers, like Amazon. Wavestone’s market benchmarks show that Public Cloud costs have caught up with Private offers for a 100% uptime. Trends even show that those costs will continue to decrease in the next couple of years and will justify the induced transformation costs.

Secondly, security, which usually results in two main concerns. The main one is operational security and is today addressed by the main Public Cloud providers investing massively in developing secure by design solutions. As a result, today’s Cloud offers are more secure than IT of clients relying on their own internal expertise. The other concern is data confidentiality and the risk of industrial espionage (especially when leveraging US Cloud Providers, due to the Patriot Act). Legal constraints, for instance personal data protection, have been reinforced over the years by contracts and strong legal frameworks (Safe Harbor, directive 65/46/CE). Our conviction is that this is a false issue since most of our clients’ data (90 to 95%) is not that sensitive, but they often fail to identify the 5 to 10% vital data that should not be anywhere else than secured in vaults and strongly encrypted.

Thirdly, the service quality. Most service providers show that availability rates are even higher than internal setups (>99% sometimes), thanks to native HA & DR capabilities with multiple data centres across the globe. In order for IT services to benefit from production grade SLAs, availability of network links must be aligned. Further alignment can be reached by replatforming applications, introducing concepts such as “design for failure”: forced industrialisation improves service quality and eases its support.

An opportunity for it departments to climb up the value ladder

The Public Cloud philosophy is based on a user-centric mindset. Adopting such a philosophy switches IT departments’ focus to their clients’ real requirements, priorities and satisfactions rather than IT assets and operations. This mindset of adoption will be further enhanced by building up client proximity in situ. A number of companies are currently endorsing and encouraging this shift, GE being a very good example.

Bringing automation to its highest level is also a key goal for IT departments in order to increase operational efficiency and optimise costs. Public Cloud solutions provide an unparalleled level of automation, leaving virtually no room for human error and reducing resources for operations. Streamlining processes and organisation is usually necessary to recover budget margins.

Relying on Public Cloud enables packaging simple IT products to be rapidly and easily disposable for agility. It also permits an increase in innovation capacity by enabling the IT department to reinvest budget margins in R&D and advisory capacity in latest innovative services.

Not only a technological transformation project

Now, while approaching the transformation towards Public Cloud, the risk is to launch a standard IT project driven by the new technology implemented and not on its adoption by customers.

Creating a small unit that will adopt methodologies and project processes inherited from lean start-ups will bring about many advantages of the Public Cloud. Starting from scratch and rapidly implementing state of the art technology with a constraints-free structure remains the best way to embrace it. Then, special care should be given to avoid diverging from the initial plan or existing structure.

In order to benefit the most from Public Cloud transformation, the lean startup approach can be combined or sequenced with a 360° IT department transformation programme. This necessitates rethinking every aspect of the IT department with a pure Cloud mind-set: technology, service catalogue, financial model, sourcing, organisation and governance.