IT modernisation series - Unisys: cloud barometer interdependencies
Unlike digital-first organisations, traditional businesses have a wealth of enterprise applications built up over decades, many of which continue to run core business processes.
In this series of articles we investigate how organisations are approaching the modernisation, replatforming and migration of legacy applications and related data services.
We look at the tools and technologies available encompassing aspects of change management and the use of APIs and containerisation (and more) to make legacy functionality and data available to cloud-native applications.
This post is written by Unisys chief technology officer Vishal Gupta — Gupta has outlined a number of tips for businesses aiming for successful cloud migration.
Gupta writes as follows…
[Our research suggests that as many as] 37% of American businesses say they have not benefited from cloud computing [and we can expect similar figures to be reflected in Europe].
Cloud barometer
This was the top takeaway from the first Unisys Cloud Success Barometer study.
The study explored the impact and importance of cloud by surveying 1,000 senior IT and business leaders in 13 countries.
But it doesn’t need to be this challenging for businesses to modernize their IT infrastructure [so here are the tips].
Build a business case to develop and demonstrate the business case for cloud adoption. Determine what challenges you are looking to solve.
Allow for discovery and assessment. Conduct a ‘discovery process’ at the outset that reviews infrastructure and applications, using a portfolio approach to understand business requirements, application dependencies, financial investments and stakeholder expectations. Use these results and integrate stakeholders into the decision-making process.
Conduct employee training, both before and after adoption. Outline a technology rollout program that includes employee feedback to ensure successful implementation.
Into interdependencies
Understand the interdependencies in your IT stack. Factors influencing treatment path decisions include business requirements, application dependencies, anticipated ROI, staff training and security. The teams will need to establish groups to help execute migrations.
Embrace multi-cloud. By choosing multiple cloud providers, businesses can take advantage of the best parts of each provider’s services, customising to suit their needs and expectations as they go. A multi-cloud strategy gives organisations greater ownership over their data, reduces the risk in case of downtime and provides negotiating leverage as they shop around for varying services among multiple vendors.
Establish cloud-enabled networks. No move to the cloud is complete without cloud-enabled network competencies. This extends a network, at any datacentre gateway, with secure private connections that enable a scalable and robust multi-cloud networking infrastructure.
Don’t overlook security and compliance. Security and compliance can be extremely challenging during cloud migration.
Businesses will be required to invest in security controls that automatically prevent or detect and remediate errors, as well as remain consistent with compliance standards like PCI, FedRAMP and GDPR.
