Cloud Service Providers Era and It's Impact in 2020

n the new era of cloud, cost optimization will be crucial. Multicloud strategies will warrant provider independence and address concentration risk. The presence of in-house cloud skills will be a key indicator of enterprise agility, including the ability to distribute cloud services where customers want to consume them, on-premises and on the edge.

These four factors will impact cloud adoption in 2020 and the steps that CIOs can take to thrive in a cloud-first world. 

Cost optimization: As most of the organizations look for opportunities to contribute to the top line, there is enough emphasis on focusing at the bottom line as well, where infrastructure cost plays a very important role. Cloud providers will continue to strengthen their native optimization capabilities to help organizations select the most cost-effective architecture that can deliver the required performance. 

Vendor Lock-in: Historically we have been dealing with vendor lock-in which causes organizations to invest heavily with the vendor, but if the vendor is not able to keep up with the technology advancements these lock-in hurts and the exit clause isn't helpful as well. Multicloud strategies will reduce vendor dependency for two-thirds of organizations through 2024. However, this will primarily happen in ways other than application portability.

Application portability is the ability to migrate an application across platforms without change, and it is seen as benefit of a multicloud strategy. The reality of business practices, though, is that few applications ever move once they have been deployed in production and adopted by the business.

Delayed migrations due to Insufficient cloud IaaS skills: Through 2022, insufficient cloud IaaS skills will delay half of enterprise IT organizations’ migration to the cloud by two years or more. Today’s cloud migration strategies tend more toward “lift-and-shift” than toward modernization or refactoring. However, lift-and-shift projects do not develop native-cloud skills. This is creating a market where service providers cannot train and certify people quickly enough to satisfy the need for skilled cloud professionals.

To overcome the challenges of this workforce shortage, enterprises looking to migrate workloads to the cloud should work with managed service providers and SIs that have a proven track record of successful migrations within the target industry. These partners must also be willing to quantify and commit to expected costs and potential savings.

Distributed cloud will support expanded service availability: In future the equipment supporting an appropriate subset of public cloud services needs to be housed in locations close enough to the point of need to support the low-latency requirements of the applications that use them. This will enable applications with such requirements to run directly from the cloud providers’ native services without having to build infrastructure. The introduction and spread of ATM-like cloud service points can be thought of as a specific implementation of edge computing, which continues to grow rapidly.

While large organizations have successfully implemented specific software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions or adopted a cloud-first strategy for new systems, many are struggling to get the full value of moving the bulk of their enterprise systems to the cloud. This is because companies tend to fall into the trap of confusing simply moving IT systems to the cloud with the transformational strategy needed to get the full value of the cloud. Just taking legacy applications and moving them to the cloud—“lift-and-shift”—will not automatically yield the benefits that cloud infrastructure and systems can provide. In fact, in some cases, that approach can result in IT architectures that are more complex, cumbersome, and costly than before.

Lift & Shift is the not right approach to adopt cloud

As a recommendation from Cloud Service Providers Lift and Shift is not enough. This is because companies tend to fall into the trap of confusing simply moving IT systems to the cloud with the transformational strategy needed to get the full value of the cloud. Just taking legacy applications and moving them to the cloud—“lift-and-shift”—will not automatically yield the benefits that cloud infrastructure and systems can provide. In fact, in some cases, that approach can result in IT architectures that are more complex, cumbersome, and costly than before.

Utilize the benefits of automating IT Process through cloud

Historically, enterprise business applications have been designed to run on custom-configured IT systems, each application requiring its own heavily customized configuration of computer storage and network resources. As a result, IT needed armies of administrators just to keep systems updated and running, to manually add new capacity when demand is high, or apply quick fixes for issues such as low performance. As the number of IT solutions has increased, so has the overhead necessary for testing, integration, and maintenance. In a typical enterprise, just a fraction of IT personnel is focused on designing and developing the market-differentiating solutions the business cares about; the rest are working simply to keep the lights on.

Based on some of the factual information available on internet Netflix is one of the most public examples of this kind of commitment to and investment in cloud-enabled, next-generation infrastructure. It spent seven years on its transformation, adopting a cloud-native approach, rebuilding all its technology, and restructuring the way it operated. It employed application program interfaces (APIs) to reduce its monolithic legacy applications into smaller components, make them more flexible, and then move them to AWS. As a result, service availability has increased, nearing the company’s stated goal of 99.99 percent uptime. And Netflix has seen IT costs for streaming fall to a fraction of what they were in its own data center.

To summarize

Every business, small or large, should make a cloud adoption strategy that is closely related to their business model. Cloud adoption strategy helps you focus on factors that are often neglected in the excitement of new technology adoption. Most of the organizations end-up cursing cloud vendors for higher pricing, inefficient resource consumption and complex infrastructure. In fact, such organizations failed to map out a proper cloud adoption strategy. The full value of cloud comes from approaching cloud not as different tactical decisions but with a holistic strategy. This strategic approach lets you view what cloud has to offer for your business growth.