Modernizing your mainframe? Here’s how to do cloud the right way — Read the paper
Modernize across cloud and on-premises IT
In the early days of cloud computing, the goals of moving to cloud were fairly straightforward: Pilot new applications, accelerate the provisioning of infrastructure and increase on-demand scalability. Today, expectations are much higher.
Cloud is now seen as a fundamental tool for business transformation — a platform for introducing new business models, fostering new ways of working and unlocking data for advanced analytics and deeper business insights. However, many organizations know that to realize these lofty goals, they need to modernize across all environments and thoughtfully optimize and integrate cloud and on-premises IT — and do that across applications, security operations, data and analytics.
Unfortunately, many cloud-only transformations don’t go as planned. For example, workloads may be moved to cloud though a lift-and-shift approach, but modernization of the underlying applications becomes complicated or stalled. Organizational silos remain in place and become obstacles to transformational change. The mission and goals of transformation are often vague and the payoff uncertain and hard to measure.
Organizations need a full understanding of what they are moving, why they are moving it and how that will contribute to achieving business goals.
The right cloud approach accelerates global expansion
A global fast-food chain set its sights on becoming one of the world’s top 5 restaurant companies, but in order to expand, the company needed to modernize its data center while also moving to the cloud. The company’s transformation program was stymied by numerous legacy IT issues: frequent outages of SAP applications, infrastructure instability and unreliable networks. Working with DXC Technology, the firm embarked on a program that reached from cloud to data center to point-of-sale terminals in 3,200 stores. DXC helped the company standardize processes, lower costs and cut IT performance-related incidents by 43 percent, then migrated SAP and associated apps to the AWS public cloud in 8 months, allowing the company to exit its aging data center and focus on business goals of growth and innovation. — Read the story
Global bank sets clear strategy to use cloud the right way
A leading global bank explored two cloud strategies — ”everything must move to cloud” and “nothing will go to cloud” — but neither strategy was successful. The firm faced significant technical debt from older technology. Demand for platform capabilities was high, but with limited available engineering resources, IT was unable to deliver on promises to the business. DXC worked with the bank to understand its challenges and lack of focus on platforms, modeling different scenarios for use of public cloud and developing a future state total cost of ownership (TCO) for each scenario. This helped the bank choose a clear Cloud Right strategy for public cloud while reducing the number of IaaS and PaaS platforms. Clear enterprise architecture rules helped application owners make the decision to move or modernize in place.
The cloud right approach
Instead of “cloud only,” organizations need to think in terms of “cloud right.” the cloud right approach makes use of careful planning, extensive testing and using a standard framework as a guide. Clear business goals need to be established at the outset, and all teams involved need to be aligned to those goals. Development skills need to go beyond just building and include the ability to assemble and orchestrate. Key considerations include:
- Know your business goals. Organizations need a full understanding of what they are moving, why they are moving it and how that will contribute to achieving business goals. Planning needs to include a strategy and schedule for which workloads will move to cloud and which will remain on premises. This plan should include priorities for modernizing applications in the right sequence and on the right platforms, never losing sight of how the applications will address business goals.
- Assess your challenges. Assess all strategic, operational, financial and technological constraints and define realistic opportunities. The organization must be prepared to track targeted improvements that boost performance as well as manage risk across cloud and on-premises IT. Also, it is crucial to clearly understand what needs to change to meet your business vision, and what process changes need to be managed to take advantages of the new opportunities your environment will bring — such as analytics, productivity and speed to market.
- Establish a solid governance structure. While transformation touches many parts of the organization, clear lines of ownership and responsibilities must be established early in the process. Identify and continually manage goals and expectations by establishing a transformation business office (TBO), performing value mapping and holding envisioning workshops with all stakeholders. Success also requires a clear communication strategy across all areas and levels of the business.