Cloud Journey in Digital TransformationDemystified

The cloud offerings enable organizations to reduce overall IT costs in multiple ways and reap maximum value from the offering.

With the onset of the pandemic, many organizations have accelerated their Digital Transformation programs and Cloud strategy by months and if not years! Organizations have utilized the slow periods to drive the transition to migrate from legacy systems to the cloud to level the various benefits offered, and also have driven many adoption campaigns to prepare the workforce as things pick up pace again.

Over and above, in today's time, many organizations grow via mergers and acquisitions, and even if they have planned on-prem or private cloud environments, the introduction of the new cloud layout into the existing architecture will force the business to adopt and leap into the multi-cloud stage. With pioneer cloud service providers as well as many specialized smaller providers entering the market, the

GIGI MATHEW THOMAS

Group Head – IT & Digital Transformation

Ittihad International Investment LLC organizations should look at way planning with a multi-cloud focus, so that the upcoming investments can be channelled accordingly and the right onboarding and training of resources is part of the plan and strategy.

Key Drivers Of Hybrid Cloud

There are two different aspects to brought up, one is about organizations deciding to go the multi-cloud way, and the other way different clouds for different services. We see a growing trend towards IT being more and more of a business enabler and to facilitate the growing demands of the business means being flexible, scalable, and agile while being effective in operating as an open unit. A well-strategized approach to multi-cloud adoption could be classified by the below drivers: Business Growth is the driver for such an approach to keep in pace with business expansions, reach a wider global audience, and capture a greater market share.

Efficiency helps to streamline processes, resulting in improved productivity and deliver customer requirements faster.

Customer Experience by leveraging new channels of engagement and automation. Agility to enable IT to be more responsive to the business needs and react faster by leveraging Saas technologies rather than being consumed in traditional application and infrastructure management tasks.

Cost can be better structured and spread out over time depending on the various licensing models available, enabling IT to operate as an open unit with the organization. Assurance, data and applications will be secure and available with better uptimes in the cloud governed by the cloud service provider's SLAs.

On the other hand, choosing from different cloud providers have different evaluation factors to be taken into consideration. Different cloud service providers have various offerings and services that could support your unique business characteristics and objective.

Cloud Security: Security is of prime concern in the cloud and unique business use cases, industry regulatory requirements, etc need to be taken into consideration.

Cloud Compliance: Depending on the organization and industry, the relevant compliance standard that is applicable can be selected as offered by the service provider.

Architecture: Consideration of how the architecture will be incorporated into your workflows, and facilitate ease of integration and consolidation.

Manageability: Different service providers have different management and orchestration tools, hence ease of use, effort, and time needed to manage the cloud infrastructure has a significant weightage.

Service Levels: Cloud SLAs and clear contractual relationships are essential to have the trust in place, citing the business’ strict needs of availability, response time, capacity, etc.

Costs: Varying cost models and pricing structures offered by service providers is a significant factor to be selected based on business model, budget and timeline.

Support: Options offered by the cloud provider on what level and form of support is needed by the business.

Key Benefits Of A Multicloud Strategy

Avoiding Vendor Lock-In is one of the most important multi-cloud advantages. If applications are built to work on one platform, the business will be tied to the same and it will be hard to switch at a later stage leading to vendor lockin. Taking a multi-cloud approach sets the business free from this approach, and can leverage new services, price benefits and deals offered by the different cloud service providers. Other key benefits that can be leveraged are as follows:

• Taking advantage of the strengths of multiple cloud providers enabled business to adopt best-of-breed solutions

• Maximum opportunity to optimize cost and performance by reviewing, comparing and picking what’s ideally architected needed for the business.

• Achieve complete agility, flexibility, scalability and workload mobility between cloud platforms with the ability to scale up and scale down depending on business requirements and even quickly spreading across geographically if needed.

• Reliability and resilience contribute to Business continuity which ensures service uptimes and commitments to customers.

• Robust Security and Risk Management enables business to set detailed policies to secure their applications and virtual platforms.

• Drive innovation by leveraging apps, and solutions built by the cloud service providers such as Machine Learning, AI, Language processing, etc to complement the business workflows.

Confidence Booster For Moving More Workloads To The Clouds

The availability of datacentres of public cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft for instance locally is a confidence booster for moving more workloads to the clouds of these providers. This is definitely a booster, especially citing the regulatory requirements of having the data locally which is applicable across many organizations in different industry segments. Also, the local presence will give a lot of confidence to traditional on prem

IT houses to reconsider moving to the cloud or even build a strategy to spread services across the cloud providers as it's due to an infrastructure refresh or new Digital Transformation initiatives kick-off.

CYBERSECURITY VULNERABILITIES EXPOSED MORE IN A MULTI-CLOUD SCENARIO?

Cybersecurity is a significant challenge when it comes to a multi cloud scenario, especially when the workloads, applications, and assets are spread across multiple platforms. It does introduce complexities, which can make it harder to secure data and prevent data leakage. It can be addressed however; it goes to say that more time and effort is required to enhance security across the platforms.

On a more positive note, since you are on multiple platforms and if have architected it well, you will not have a single point of failure and the other service providers can share the load until services are reinstated.