As digital transformation has become a necessity to remain competitive, many large companies are turning to the cloud, attracted by the promises of agility, cost reduction and innovation. So why do so many of them struggle to maximize their success?
According to Gartner, 85% of companies will adopt a "cloud-first" strategy by 2025 and according to a McKinsey study, the move to the cloud could increase company profits by 20% over a five-year period. A value proposition that very often struggles to materialize.
The cloud is often perceived as a miracle solution to solve all technological problems. However, this perception is misleading. It is not because a company is equipped with cloud infrastructures that it will suddenly see its performance take off, just as owning a Formula 1 car does not guarantee winning a Grand Prix. The value, and therefore the success, depends on how its resources are integrated into the IT system, both technologically and operationally. It's all about integrating the cloud into a transformation project that goes beyond the technical aspect, to rethink the processes around the construction, operation and maintenance of IT systems by relying on the essential and exclusive characteristics of the cloud.
Too many companies migrate their existing applications to the cloud without impacting, or only marginally, the IT operational processes and models, or the reference application architectures. They simply replicate what they were doing before, but in a new environment. An environment that has the needed flexibility to make this technically possible and functional, giving the illusion of success while ultimately little (or no) value is generated.
The trap of transposition without transformation
This conservative approach, consisting of "doing as before but in the cloud", does not make it possible to unleash the full potential of the technology. Worse, it can even lead to higher costs and increased complexity. The cloud is more that a new place to host your files. It is a fundamentally different model, based on the immediate availability of pooled resources. This immediacy has a non-negligible cost, with an additional cost of around 300% for a monthly use of a cloud resource compared to an equivalent traditional dedicated resource. Not relying on this specific feature of the cloud to produce value or optimization is mechanically making the transformation a financial failure.
To understand why some companies fail to maximize the benefits of the cloud, it is essential to return to these five fundamental characteristics, as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and to examine the human barriers to their optimization:
- On-demand user access to services – It is the “self-service model”, which allows a user who needs it to use (and return) a resource immediately, without any pre-validation tickets nor processes. Difficult to implement as it clashes with generally established practices and carries the fear of "reckless and illegitimate spending". Approaches combining self-service and control exist, in particular by offering customized service catalogs and effective reactive control mechanisms that require as much the implementation of new processes as the evolution of one's perception and implementation of responsibilities.
- Broad network access that relies primarily on high-quality and high-capacity (bandwidth) service, ensuring that the network does not become a contention point for present or future needs. An essential point to validate, particularly in hybrid or private contexts. Added to this is the necessary implementation of fast route and flow opening processes, allowing in necessarily compartmentalized environments a rapid connectivity so as not to break the agility model promised by the cloud's ability to quickly evolve.
- Resource pooling, which mainly concerns the service provider, cloud provider, SaaS publisher... or the IT department when it provides a cloud service. A typical example of an error related to this characteristic: container orchestration (Kubernetes) associated with an application when the pooled model advocates for a Kubernetes service used by several applications in a common orchestration. Pooling strongly optimizes costs, ownership, and operation, and contributes to the agility required by modern projects.
- Rapid elasticity which offers real-time adaptability, a guarantee of budget optimization and improved quality of service by allowing at any time to adjust the resource mobilized (and billed) to the actual need, including during exceptional activity phases. Exclusive to the cloud model, this feature requires adapted applications to be fully exploited. It is often possible to adapt existing applications, sometimes at a lower cost, what is certain is that generating value through this feature requires for a new application to be considered from the beginning and for an existing application to study the changes to be made: mobilize your application architects.
- Measured service which provides the necessary visibility to control an environment that we wish by design to be agile, self-service and rich but that we also wish to pilot, from the scale of the IT system up to the application level. Measuring is collecting, aggregating, synthesizing and presenting, requiring a particular effort which in many cases can be pooled by deploying freely and easily integratable services and tools. Measurement is the first tool for control.
Finally, the general state of mind in a cloud environment must be one of continuous optimization and support for innovation. Making things possible, facilitating tasks, accepting changes and considering failures or mistakes as the acquisition of knowledge to do better next time. The cloud is not a technical infrastructure issue, it is a paradigm shift that has made the success of an entire new digital economy and all those who have known how to transform themselves to exploit the cloud model.
Of course, no one expects a large organization to be turned upside down overnight, the inertia of a technical, methodological and operational context inherited from many years of IT practice makes the evolution long: for tools, for processes, for humans. But there is no change of direction without a notion of the direction to take or without the will to turn, through successive iterations. With a progressivity adapted to the context, the liner moves and each additional degree carries value.
In a nutshell, the cloud should not be seen as an end, but as a transformation tool. Those who will know how to exploit it to reinvent their operations will be the big winners of the digital revolution. The others risk being left behind, despite their brand new Formula 1.