Migrating Mature Companies to the Cloud Opportunities & - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Migrating Mature Companies to the Cloud 
 Opportunities & Challenges

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What is a “Mature Company”?

• Established IT dating back over 40+ years
• Large installed base of hardware and

facilities

• Systems span multiple infrastructure and

development methodologies

• Heterogeneous inter-systems communications
• Complex processes and decision making
• Belief that infrastructure is hard to change

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Are There a Lot of Mature Companies?

• Gartner makes some interesting

predictions for global IT spend in 2016

• Total spend, $4 Trillion
• Public Cloud spend, $203 Billion
• Or in other words only 5% of the global IT

budget will be spent on Public Cloud

• Looks like there are a lot of mature

companies out there

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CHALLENGES & BENEFITS

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Challenges

• Confusion, what is Cloud, lack of an

understanding of what will be delivered

• Complex processes designed for a

traditional technology stack and it's accompanying timelines

• Locked in costs and assets, existing DCs,

contracts, hardware and software licensing

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Benefits

• Most companies core business is not IT

, they need to…

• Reduce fixed costs to deliver competitive

advantage

• Focus on projects that improve the

business

• Stop spending just to “keep the lights on”
• Keep pace with rapid technical change

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PRACTICALITIES

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Perception Management

• Develop a clear understanding of what the

Cloud will deliver in the context of the

• rganisation
• Put in place a framework that allows

scope of opportunities and benefits to be

• bjectively determined
• Stay grounded, in many ways it is best to

regard the Cloud as just another data centre

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Entry Conditions for Cloud Migration

• Establish a clear set of goals that

migrating to Cloud will deliver

• Back this up with a well defined strategy
• Identify behavioural and organisational

changes required

• Understand what activities the company

can stop doing

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How to Approach Migration

• Cloud First, all new applications are built

in the Cloud

• Hardware Refresh, applications migrate

when hardware is due for refresh

• Big Bang, tackle biggest/hardest systems

first, the rest will be easy

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Cost of Change

• Cloud will bring down operating costs and

(largely) eliminate capex

• But it takes time to achieve this
• In the short term change will cost and this

has to be funded

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EMBRACE THE FOLLOWING

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Which Cloud Vendor?

• Clouds are not interchangeable
• Vendors strive to differentiate their
• fferings with bespoke Intellectual

Property (IP)

• Higher value offerings are vendor IP

specific

• Understand implications and value

delivered by adopting vendor IP

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Key Technical Issues

• Don’t over complicate the process, first

stage will see many systems “Lift & Shift”

• Avoid prolonged debate of PAAS vs SAAS vs

“serverless” vs latest buzz words

• Work to understand the security model,

where does responsibility transfer between vendor and customer

• Is something missing, e.g. an AV offering?

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Organisational & Cultural Change

• Cloud will impact areas other than

technology

• The utility based model is not well

understood

• Simplify decision making and processes to

support increased rate of change

• Delegate authority to the lowest practical

level, move from an approval model to self service

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Management & Control

• Be realistic about how Cloud will be

adopted

• Understand how it will be managed and

controlled

• Avoid temptation to implement
• verarching approach that across internal

IT and Cloud

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Skills & Resourcing

• There is a resourcing challenge, Cloud

skills are currently in demand

• Don’t underestimate the contribution of

existing staff

• Knowledge of company systems can make

a significant difference

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AN EXAMPLE OF CHANGE
 THE SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE

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Changing the Enterprise SDLC

• Traditional/Enterprise SDLC has a complex

set of checks and balances

• Evolved to deliver systems correctly sized

for the expected workload

• Hardware is a key driver, being expensive,

slow to deploy and difficult to change

• Given the number of under-utilised servers

in most data centres it is an error prone process

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The Cloud SDLC

• Cloud fundamentally changes the nature of

infrastructure

• It removes one of the core assumptions of the SDLC
• This makes a number of significant changes possible
• Less time spent on design, more on prototyping and

measurement

• Enables data based decision making, more likely to be

correct

• Low risk when a server is deployed in minutes at the

cost of a few dollars

• Use automation to deliver repeatable results, scalable

systems

• Change approach to delivering DR solutions

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A FEW LAST WORDS

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Identity

In the cloud, user identity is changing. The user identity is held somewhere, and access is granted on a platform by platform basis, i.e. use Facebook login details, authenticate, and then Spotify give you access to their premium content and other bits specific to their platform. That means you need to really trust Facebook to hold your master credentials very securely as you've put all your eggs in one basket. But if you assume theses guys are doing a better job than you could, in your data centre, on your kit, with the small amount of resources you have to secure the environment, then you're in good hands. So could you use your Facebook login for your corporate systems? Are they a better identity manager than you, of course!! Do all your traditional legacy systems allow Facebook to pass credentials in to authenticate you? Not at all. So in the short term, we're stuck with AD and ADFS. Glen Robinson, Chief Technology Officer, Computer Sciences Corporation

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