Gartner’s Five Key Areas for Cloud Strategy
Gartner proposes a bi-modal approach to cloud strategy that considers both the existing estate of applications, processes and data (mode 1) along with leveraging the agility and speed to innovate and take advantage of cloud-native capabilities (mode 2).
Gartner further describes the five key elements of the strategy as:
- Cloud Decision Framework
- Cloud Operations Best Practices
- Cloud Application Migration and Development
- Hybrid Cloud Deployment
- Becoming a Cloud Service Provider
A Cloud Decision Framework provides a consistent way to evaluate when and how cloud services are used, considering benefits, costs, risks and security. This enables a consistent evaluation of applications and use cases for the move to the cloud.
The framework looks at benefits and challenges across several factors: application factors (such as business requirements, need for agility, current architecture and user distribution), data (such as compliance and security issues, size of dataset and update frequency), integration points (nature and frequency of interactions, latency concerns, need to move data between cloud and on-prem) along with operational and innovation considerations (operational costs and efficiency must be combined with mitigation of risk to current business operations, balanced with the need to innovate).
Based on the evaluation of these factors, a view of cloud readiness, along with benefits, risks and challenges should be determined for each potential cloud scenario. This then allows the organisation to plot a sensible path by prioritising the high benefit and low-risk cases and eliminating those that are low benefit and high risk.
Cloud Operations Best Practices must be established for the use of cloud in areas such as security, management and governance of public and hybrid cloud services, along with vendor management. With these best practices, the perceived risk goes down, and paths to concrete value go up.
Hybrid and multi-cloud environments provide unique security, management and governance issues. Considerations here include data security and encryption, IT management across multiple services, governance over groups offering services, and supporting technologies.
Application Migration Options must be understood and selected based on the business goals and characteristics of each application. Those that are cloud-ready could be moved to cloud hosting in a “lift and shift” approach. This may realise some cost benefits but is not leveraging true cloud potential. Going further, application development strategies need to evolve to understand where and how cloud-optimised and cloud-native applications can be created, and what opportunities arise for the organisation as a result.
Cloud optimisation involves refactoring/redesigning applications to take advantage of cloud platforms’ global-class characteristics, such as horizontal scalability, fault tolerance, high performance, efficiency, and interoperability.
Cloud-native applications are designed from the ground up to take advantage of the defining characteristics of cloud computing. They are built using the core principles, patterns and best practices that deliver and support these characteristics.
Typically a six R’s classification (Re-host, Re-platform, Re-factor, Re-purchase, Retire, Retain) is made for each application.
Considering the Hybrid Cloud Deployment approach, organisations have a host of options from on-prem cloud services, private cloud, public cloud, distributed cloud and even cloud-inspired on-prem solutions. Trade-offs around cost, complexity, security and control, and the level of cloud benefits (such adaptability, flexibility and elasticity) that can be achieved must be carefully considered and aligned with business objectives. Containerisation is an approach that can be followed to enable a degree of portability across each deployment type.
Finally, Gartner raises the importance of thinking like a Cloud Service Provider, focusing on when and where the enterprise will deliver application functionality, information, or business process capabilities to its customers or business partners.