How to Formulate Your Cloud Strategy · continuous integration and continuous delivery, which are...
Transcript of How to Formulate Your Cloud Strategy · continuous integration and continuous delivery, which are...
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How to Formulate Your Cloud Strategy
A methodology for migrat ing IT serv ices to the c loud
A WHITE PAPERBY CLOUD CRUISER
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Execut ive Summary
As cloud computing accelerates, and its value becomes better known and understood, both
the hype and the economic need pressure IT to begin migration of some applications or utility
services to cloud platforms. Moving the wrong services could result in huge and expensive
troubles, but failing to move the right services could mean lost opportunities. So, how do you
evaluate and select the right IT services to move?
In this paper, we’ve put together a methodology to pick the right services for migration to cloud-
based platforms. We’ll consider the major service categories, such as data and applications, as
well as how they rank in importance to the business.
This paper is business case-focused, meaning the migration to the cloud should have a clear
business benefit. We’ll provide concepts to better understand the value proposition for the use of
cloud-based platforms, as well as suggest approaches and tools that will help you understand the
existing state of your IT assets. You’ll also learn how you can benefit from moving some or most
of these services to public, private, and hybrid cloud platforms, and how to monitor that value
once your cloud-based systems are in production.
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In t roduct ion
Many in IT find it hard to translate their
existing business needs into a true migration
plan. We’re quickly reaching a point in time
when a migration plan will be a requirement,
one that includes financial considerations and
strong metrics. Those who have kicked the
cloud computing can down the road for the
last several years now face situations where
cloud computing can provide some unique
strategic and economic advantages that can
no longer be ignored.
The first trick is to understand how to define
the business value. The second trick is to
define the business case for the migration, as
well as the prioritization of services, and then
develop an ongoing strategy to monitor and
optimize the financial value to the business.
This means leaving nothing to chance. You
need complete visibility into what drives your
cloud solution, and how that cloud solution is
measured in terms of operations, as well as
the strategic value to the business.
The concepts provided in this paper will guide
you through the process of selecting the right
IT services for migration to the cloud. We will
also provide a model in the form of an Excel
spreadsheet that you can leverage for your
own enterprise to do a self-evaluation. The
examples in this paper use that tool, and we’ll
walk you through a use case using the same
concepts, process, and model.
This model should provide the knowledge and
methodology you’ll need to get through the
initial analysis, and put you on the right path
toward enterprise service migration to the
cloud. The model is meant to be modified to
meet your exact needs. As such, it will provide
a sound foundation to get you started on the
right path to move your IT services to cloud
computing, or give you an understanding as to
why certain services should not move to the
cloud.
This approach provides the ability to
understand the technology benefits of
leveraging cloud computing for certain IT
services, as well as how to form business
cases that will typically guide you toward
the right services selections. It’s a matter
of understanding what goes where, and
then following a process to create the right
prioritization of service migration (when it
goes), and how this all translates into a master
plan (how it goes).
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There are a few fundamental issues to consider when selecting which IT services should
move to the cloud, including the business use case, the demand for the service, and the
patterns of usage. During the selection process, we evaluate the services as potential private
or public cloud services, and approach this problem from the business to the technology.
As an accompaniment to this white paper, we provide you with a basic model in the form of
a spreadsheet that you can leverage as-is, or modify to meet the exact requirements of your
organization. You now have the guidelines and the basic tool you’ll need to make the right
initial calls.
>> Open spreadsheet here
The process we suggest is basic, but effective, if followed correctly. There are two major
steps:
First, create a list of IT services that should be considered for relocation to the cloud. These
services will be categorized and evaluated for the purposes of understanding their relevance
to the business and their dependencies on other key factors, as depicted in Figure 1. Second,
consider these services in relationship to different cloud models, and understand the patterns
of the IT services in the process, as depicted in Figure 2. Note that the output from one,
feeds into the other.
Select ing IT Serv ices for Cloud
Figure 1: The process of selecting IT services for the cloud results in the initial services catalog, which defines the ser-vices that should move to new platforms, including cloud-based platforms.
Model
IT Service Identification Model
Note: Zero out existing values in green and input the values that are relevant to your business.
Service CategoriesRelative importance to the business
Data35%
Application35%
Infrastructure10%
Management10%
DevOps10%
Sum100%
Service Position Relative to Benefit (1-5 scale) 1=less advantaged 5=more advantaged
AgilityTime to MarketCostScalingRiskBus ValueOther
Data32.5322.533
Application3.533322.52
Infrastructure433.532.522.5
Management3422322
DevOps32.543222
Weighted Scoring, Service Positioning
BenefitsWeightingAgilityTime to MarketCostScalingRiskBus ValueOther
Data35%1.10.91.10.70.91.11.1
Application35%1.21.11.11.10.70.90.7
Infrastructure10%0.40.30.40.30.30.20.3
Management10%0.30.40.20.20.30.20.2
DevOps10%0.30.30.40.30.20.20.2
Index score100%3.32.93.12.62.32.52.4
Relative importance of Service Catagories:
Individual benefits of Cloud Service:
Mapping a few benefits against each other:
Time to MarketDataApplicationInfrastructureManagementDevOps0.8751.04999999999999980.300000000000000040.40.25AgilityDataApplicationInfrastructureManagementDevOps1.04999999999999981.22499999999999990.40.300000000000000040.30000000000000004Time to MarketDataApplicationInfrastructureManagementDevOps0.8751.04999999999999980.300000000000000040.40.25CostDataApplicationInfrastructureManagementDevOps1.04999999999999981.04999999999999980.350000000000000030.20.4DataApplicationInfrastructureManagementDevOps0.350.350.10.10.1AgilityDataApplicationInfrastructureManagementDevOps1.04999999999999981.22499999999999990.40.300000000000000040.30000000000000004CostDataApplicationInfrastructureManagementDevOps1.04999999999999981.04999999999999980.350000000000000030.20.4ScalingDataApplicationInfrastructureManagementDevOps0.71.04999999999999980.300000000000000040.20.30000000000000004RiskDataApplicationInfrastructureManagementDevOps0.8750.70.250.300000000000000040.2Bus ValueDataApplicationInfrastructureManagementDevOps1.04999999999999980.8750.20.20.2OtherDataApplicationInfrastructureManagementDevOps1.04999999999999980.70.250.20.2
IT Service Selection ToolFile AttachmentDouble-click to open
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Understand the Business
The first step in the process is to understand
the core business IT assets. What systems
are already in place, including applications,
data, services, processes, security
and governance? We do this to form a
fundamental understanding of what exists
before we move through the process of
creating the services catalog. Lacking this
information, we can’t identify the services
that are best to relocate to the cloud.
The idea here is to gain a good
understanding of the application
architectures, use of data, governance,
security, etc., and thus know the best
way to turn core application services into
cloud services. This includes having an
understanding of the structure and workings
of the database, how the database is
accessed, the use and execution of business
logic, integration with user interfaces and
perhaps other core business processes.
The Process
The best way to deal with this situation
is to decompose the application into
functional primitives, typically data, services,
processes, user interfaces, processes, etc.
However, this is no easy task, taking months
for larger enterprises.
From there we can understand each
primitive, and then recreate a logical
architecture for the application that best fits
the needs of the cloud service we’re looking
to expose or migrate. Then it’s a matter
of mapping the new logical architecture
into a physical architecture, and then you
can define the work to create that physical
architecture.
The output from this process is typically a
list of IT assets, what they do, how much
they cost, ownership, and other details
you can gather that will provide a better
understanding as we move through the
remainder of the process.
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Data
Appl icat ions
Services that are primarily concerned with producing and
consuming data. While these are typically databases, they
could be data services that exist on top of existing data as
well.
Services that provide core solution functionality, such as
business processes. They are typically bound to data or data
services, as we’ve previously defined. However, it’s helpful to
break them out into their own category to better understand
services as separate and more primitive concepts.
Services that provide core infrastructure services, such as
storage and compute, which are not specifically bound to an
application or data service. Think of this category as providing
all of the foundational services that allow applications and
data to exist.
Services that manage other services. For example, the ability
to monitor applications, data, and infrastructure operations.
They provide a “single pane of glass” view into the other IT
services, which may become cloud services. All services, no
matter if they are legacy or cloud-based, require some type of
management.
Services that are focused on the development, deployment,
testing, and operations of an application. The term refers
to development and operations working together, as well as
core services that support both development and operations.
This also includes newer and emerging concepts, such as
continuous integration and continuous delivery, which are
directly associated with the use of on-demand cloud-based
platforms.
Def ine Serv ice Categor ies
In the first step, we begin to place the candidate services into service categories, including:
In f rastructure
The Process
Management
DevOps
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How the service is linked to the data defined in the previous step. For instance, a customer edit service would obviously work on customer data
Defines how services are linked to applications
How the services is bound to infrastructure services, such as storage
Refers to who owns the service(s), including people, organizations, cloud providers, etc.
How the service will likely perform during operations. Complex services can perform poorly due to dependencies upon external system services, while simple services typically perform well considering that not much is going on.
The service’s security services, such as encryption.
The compliance issues the service must handle. For example, the need to comply with emerging healthcare regulations.
The aspects of organizational policy that are parts of the service. For example, accounting policies around accounts payable leverage the accounting organization.
How the service should be managed. For example, management interfaces the service may provide.
Data Bindings
Appl icat ion Bindings
Infrastructure Bindings
Owners
Performance
Secur i ty
Compl iance
Organizat ion
Management Prof i le
The Process
Def ine Candidate Serv ices
In this step, we take the IT services we’ve listed, and evaluate them based on dependencies
and other core concepts listed below:
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Create Initial Services Catalog
The value of services catalogs is to provide
a single access point for discovery, as well
as access to any number of services that
provide application functionality or data for
use by end users or applications. The value
is that we’re able to reuse these services
across applications, and they may exist on
any number of platforms, including private
and public clouds.
Cloud services catalogs are a centralized
resource to both discover and leverage
private or public cloud services. Growing
from the service registries and repositories
from the days of SOA, this technology is
now new and improved to provide a single
gateway for service access for applications
and end users.
The initial services catalog feeds into the
next part of the process. This is basically
a list of services that we’ve identified
through the processes and steps defined
in this section of the paper. They become
the initial starting point, a list of services
that are relevant to the business, and thus
services that should be considered for
cloud-platforms. The catalog defines what
these services do, their current operating,
and the costs of operating these services in
private or public clouds.
The Process
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Once we have the initial services catalog, it’s time to select the right cloud-platform model
or models to leverage. Figure 2 depicts this process, through the creation of service profiles
and service bundles, and then using that information to select a cloud model (IaaS, PaaS, and
SaaS), as well as a delivery model (private, public, hybrid, or community). You can think of
this as selecting the right platform based upon the requirements we’ve previously gathered,
and the analysis in the model we provided.
The Model
Figure 2: Selecting the appropriate cloud model to host enterprise services requires an understanding of the services, the cloud models, and the delivery models. Using this process, we can determine where the enterprise services should best reside.
To select the right services to move to the cloud, you should define the categories of services
that are most important to the business. These are typically services that cost the most to
operate, and thus should be considered first when you’re looking to move to cloud platforms.
The next steps are to define the cloud models to deploy on. This is rarely a single selection,
such as just IaaS. More likely, you’ll pick a few if not all models of clouds, including IaaS, PaaS,
and SaaS, for use within your enterprise. This multi-cloud approach, or, leveraging several
cloud models and cloud brands, is common.
Finally, you need to select a delivery model. Your choices are private, public, hybrid and
community. Again, most enterprises will leverage a mix of public and private, thus hybrid is
the most popular approach. Indeed, there may be many brands of private and public clouds in
play at most enterprises. Your approach is completely dependent upon the business problems
you want to solve, as well as the analysis in the model we’ve provided.
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The Model
Table 1: To select the right services to move to the cloud, define the categories of services that are most important to the business. This table drives a ranking approach that allows you to pick what service categories are most important to your business.
Let’s continue with understanding the model. Table 1, from our spreadsheet model, drives a
ranking approach for the service categories by considering their relevant importance to the
business. Note that the ranking will change based upon the types of organizations, including
the business objectives, that are currently in place.
Figure 3 shows the ranking via a spider diagram. Note that in our example, data and
application service categories are most important to this business. This the typical case for
most enterprises, but some place a greater emphasis upon infrastructure and management
than data and applications. Newer organizations may stress services related to DevOps,
considering that they are typically building new applications at a much greater rate.
Figure 3: This is how the ranking looks when we compare service categories using our example’s data. Your organization may look very different, and that’s okay.
Service Category Relat ive Importance to the Business
Data 35%
Appl icat ion 35%
Infrastructure 10%
Management 10%
DevOps 10%
Sum 100%
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The Model
Additionally, we will need to rank each service category with other factors, including “Agility,”
“Time to Market,” “Cost,” etc. (see Table 2). This allows us to figure the relative advantages
each service category brings to the business, and thus allows us to better prioritize the
ranking of types of services that should move to the cloud.
Again, the potential benefits that are ranked against the service categories include:
The organization’s ability to change to accommodate new requirements, such as changes in the market. Cloud computing can provide resources on-demand, as well as change those resources, which provides the value of agility.
Related to agility, time to market speeds business solutions into production. For example, applications can be quickly created and updated to accommodate new product lines, or changes to product lines.
An obvious benefit is reducing the amount of IT services costs. The less the better.
The solution can scale up to support more users and higher processing loads. Cloud computing typically can self- or auto-provision, and has access to a massive amount of resources, which results in the ability to scale.
In typical cloud architectures, we avoid risk by shifting that risk to public cloud providers. They invest in hardware and software infrastructure, not your enterprise, and thus there is less cost of risk to your organization.
The ability to increase the value of the business with the use of cloud-based platforms as way to drive innovation and grow revenue.
Other things that you may want to consider include compliance, organizational culture, customer management, etc. Keep in mind that you will have to adjust this model to meet the exact needs of your organization; these are just general guidelines.
Agi l i ty
Time to Market
Cost
Scal ing
Risk
Business Value
Other
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The Model
Table 2: Rank each service category with other factors. This allows us to figure the relative advantages of each service category, and thus allows us to better prioritize the ranking of types of services that should move to the cloud.
So, using our example data in the Table 2 model, we can rank each benefit relative to our
business for each service category (the data entry area is green), in this case, from 1 to 5.
The idea is to rank the true benefits to your organization, and this goes against the weighting
around the service categories (see Table 1), and is also stated in Table 2 as well.
The calculations on the lower table, are the weighted scores as to how much weight you
put on each service category (from Table 1), as related to the benefits and the ranking you
provided from 1 to 5. The index score on the bottom line is telling, considering your input, and
should be leveraged to determine priorities as to which services to move first to the cloud.
Service Categor ies Relat ive to Benef i t ( 1 -5 scale) 1= less advantaged, 5=most advantaged
Agi l i ty Time to Market
Cost Scal ing Risk Business Value
Other
Data 3 2.5 3 2 2.5 3 3
Appl icat ions 3.5 3 3 3 2 2.5 2
Infrastructure 4 3 3.5 3 2.5 2 2.5
Management 3 2.5 2 2 3 2 2
Operat ions 3 2.5 4 3 2 21 2
Weighted Scor ing, Service Posi t ioning
Weight-ing
Agi l i ty Time to Market
Cost Scal ing Risk Business Value
Other
Data 35% 1.1 0.9 1 .1 0.7 0.9 1 .1 1 .1
Appl icat ions 35% 1.2 1 .1 1 .1 1 .1 0.7 0.9 0.7
Infrastructure 10% 0.4 0.3 0.4 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.3
Management 10% 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.3 0.2 0.2
Operat ions 10% 0.3 0.3 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.2
Index Score 100% 3.3 2.7 3.1 2.6 2.3 2.5 2.4
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The Model
An Example
For example, a retailer wants to prioritize the initial services that should be relocated to the
cloud. In their ranking of service categories, “Data” is most important for our retailer, say,
60%. As an aspect of the “Data” service category, “Agility” and “Time to Market” are the most
important benefits, and thus are rated as 4 out of 5 each. After filling out the other rankings
around service categories, the index score will reveal the calculation that provides suggested
prioritization of service migration. In this case its “Data” services that provide the core
benefits of “Agility” and “Time to Market,” which will typically be at the top of this list.
Again, this is to be leveraged as a structured approach to selecting services for migration.
Consider that this process will take years for most businesses. It’s important to migrate the
services that provide the most value first. Moving in correct priority order means that the
benefit of cloud computing will be effective sooner. Moreover, leveraging a cloud financial
management system, such as discussed later in this paper, will provide validation of the value
that the migration of these services to the cloud will, or are, actually bringing.
Figure 4, below, is a spider diagram that depicts the top three benefits (agility, time-to-market,
and cost), as ranked against the service categories in our example. This helps you understand
how the benefits map to specific service patterns that are important to the business.
Figure 4: This is a graphic representation of the top three benefits, as ranked against the service categories.
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Leveraging Tools and Technology to Def ine Demand
WHAT YOU NEED WHAT YOU’LL GET
BEST
• Understanding of biggest consumers and why• Unit cost data for baselines and benchmarking
Dashboard level reporting and tracking• More credibility in business cost analysis
• Detailed consumption of all resource units• Detailed consumption of all resource units by
department• Detailed costs by resource unit
GOO
D • An aggregate of existing consumption and costs • Tops down look at costs at the server or instance level compared to a total forecasted number
BETT
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• Existing consumption by major resource group (CPU, memory, storage, network)
• Costs by major resource group
• ‘T-shirt’ sizing comparison data
• Demand counts for build or buy decisions and improved ability to estimate public cloud costs
In order to understand and quantify the demand for IT services, you need visibility into cost
analysis, both past and future. As depicted in Figure 5, you can see that we have good, better,
and best approaches, where the best approach is an understanding of the detailed consumption
of all resource units by department, as well as detailed costs by resource unit. Resource units
are the way we measure the use of cloud on traditional IT resources.
Figure 5: In order to determine costs, you’ll need a good understanding of consumption.
In gathering this data, we need to identify the largest consumers, and understand why they are
the largest. Also, define the unit cost of data for baselines and benchmarking. Finally, we need
a dashboard for reporting and tracking, and the ability to track this data back to the IT resource.
These tools enable you to make the right calls, in terms of IT services that should be considered
for relocation to cloud-based platforms. Without this data, you could select IT services that are
actually more costly to run in the cloud, or perhaps don’t provide the business value to even
be considered for a move to the cloud. Moving the wrong services to the wrong platform is a
common, and costly, problem for enterprises.
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Leveraging Tools and Technology to Def ine Demand
Tools and technology that are useful here include those that provide cloud financial management
capabilities, such as those by Cloud Cruiser. Cloud Cruiser offers a funding model for your
cloud investment, based upon measurable, defensible IT service usage, not arbitrary accounting
allocations. You can now make calls around the migration of IT services based upon real
business need, and eliminate wasteful spending caused by selecting the wrong services to
move that don’t provide the best impact to the business (see Figure 6).
Figure 6: Cloud financial management systems provide dashboards for use by cloud providers and cloud consumers that offer an immediate look at the state of the business, in terms of usage, cost, billings, etc.
Other features you should consider include:
Automated IT cost collection across hybrid IT which provides automated collection of all your
IT cost data from any private cloud, public cloud, and traditional IT computing platform. This
data is leveraged as foundational analysis to understand the true value of moving services into
private, public, or hybrid clouds.
Universal heterogeneous IT cost metering allows complete cost transparency by collecting
any measurable IT service cost from web services, APIs, databases, spreadsheets, log files, and
more. Considering the issues covered in this paper, this tool helps us understand existing costs
prior to migration of IT services to cloud-based platforms, as well as understand the value they
deliver, or not, when hosted on cloud-based platforms.
Hierarchical IT cost resource mapping allows you to align your IT budgets with business goals
by providing finance and management with cost visibility by department, IT service, business
function, technology tower, or any other accounting structure.
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Conclusion
This paper provides basic guidance to form an understanding of your existing state of IT, and
how the use of cloud-based platforms may benefit your business, or not. The intent was not to
present just a bunch of decoupled concepts, but to provide you with the steps you need to make
good decisions about the use of cloud computing, and even a model that provides a mathematical
approach to make your decisions. While no approach is foolproof, having a foundation of
understanding increases your chances of success.
Enterprises re-focused these days on migration to public and private clouds, but often have no
clue how the process works. Many just follow the hype. Smarter organizations understand that
the business case is where the focus should be. This includes an understanding of existing legacy
IT assets, and then following a process to determine which IT assets provide a good business
case for their movement to a cloud platform.
A surprising number of enterprises do not use this business-driven approach to cloud computing
migration. Most lack visibility into existing assets and operational costs, and few understand the
true costs to relocate to and operate on public and private cloud platforms. It’s unacceptably
common for enterprises to move major business processes and other IT services to cloud-based
platforms that actually cost more than traditional platforms, and add risk to the business. You don’t
want to face these issues.
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About the Author
Leading technology publications frequently name David S.
Linthicum among the top 10 enterprise technologists in the
world. He is a true thought leader in the industry, and an expert
in complex distributed systems, including cloud computing,
data integration, service oriented architecture (SOA), and big
data systems. As the author of over 13 books on computing
with over 3,000 published articles, as well as radio and TV
appearances as a computing expert, he is often quoted in
major business and technology publications. In addition, David
is a frequent keynote presenter at industry conferences, with
over 500 presentations given in the last 20 years.
David’s industry experience includes tenures as CTO and
CEO of several successful public and private software
companies, and upper-level management positions in Fortune
100 companies. Dave has delivered over $2 billion dollars in
value by transforming companies from traditional to innovative
technologies, moving them to lucrative exits that benefitted
investors, employees, and customers.
Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Silicon Valley,
California, Cloud Cruiser offers an innovative cloud financial
management solution that was built from the ground up
to support the cloud economy. It maximizes freedom of
choice for enterprises and service providers by providing
dynamic financial intelligence, chargeback, and billing across
heterogeneous IT environments. The company’s key strategic
partners include: Microsoft, HP, Cisco, VMware, Amazon,
Openstack, and Rackspace.
www.cloudcruiser.com
+1 844-223-9737 (USA)
+316250-66-463 (EMEA)
David L inth icum
Cloud Cruiser