Category Archives: Cloud

The Cloud – Do You Know The Many Hidden Benefits?

The Cloud – Many Hidden Benefits

If you are planning to move to the cloud business plan Cloud Business Planis the first step and often a requirement for most organizations. That plan will contain expected outcomes. The success of the move to the cloud will then be judged by if those outcomes materialize. In this post we explore what most organizations put into those plans.

The post takes a look at the unexpected outcomes organizations, that have jumped to the cloud, are seeing they did not include in their original plans.  Lets call those the hidden benefits of the cloud.

The general expected outcomes

Almost every company starts their journey looking into the cloud as a money saving exercise. Saving Money With The CloudThis makes sense as it is rare for investment to happen without some payback expectation. Investments in the cloud are no different.

Costs organizations generally factor into that business case, that they hope cloud can help with, can include many things but often these 4 are always present:

  1. New hardware capital expenditure as things scale.
  2. Maintenance capital expenditure around existing hardware (including any extended or special warranties).
  3. Operational expenditure around running a physical location (buildings, cooling, electricity and more) – could also be a capital expenditure if they have to buy the property outright.
  4. Capital and/or operational expenditure focused on support and maintenance of parts of the software stack (applying hotfixes, having access to technical support etc).

Continue reading The Cloud – Do You Know The Many Hidden Benefits?

Where should you start your cloud journey?

Your cloud journey – where should you start?

If you are reading this expecting me to tell you the answer then I am afraid I will disappoint you. Every single organization I have spoken to is different and I expect your organization is too. The cloud journey can take many different directions and what is the right place to start for one organization might not be right for another.

Beware of anyone that tells youCloud Journey Compass their view of the “right answer” without first understanding your company, its priorities, its history and without first showing you the breadth of options available from which you can make your first steps.

This is a journey that needs to be navigated in partnership. It is your cloud journey not mine!

Early advice

  1. Make sure you understand the breadth of what you can do today in the cloud.
  2. Make sure you understand there are many different ways to work with the cloud. When you think about your cloud journey remember it is not a one size fits all.
  3. Think about what your first, second and third workloads might be to decide who will be the best vendor for you.
  4. Try to avoid falling into the trap of ending up with 10 cloud providers. Remember that learning multiple clouds is not in your best interest longer term and you will probably consolidate later.
  5. Do something now. Your competitors are.

Continue reading Where should you start your cloud journey?

Quantifying Cloud Adoption – Is It Really Happening?

Quantifying Cloud Adoption – Is It Really Happening?

In my post from yesterday, Cloud – Are You Already Falling Behind?, I shared my view that there is a shift of many companies to the cloud.  In this post I want to share a little external validation that backs that up and helps quantify if cloud adoption is really happening or coming to an organization near you soon!

What the Analysts and Management Consultants are saying

We all know that not everything analysts and management consultants predict, and say, comes true. They are in a tough spot having to predict the future for sure reliant on information flowing from their many contacts and surveys. What we can do though is look at a variety of sources and from that draw some clear conclusions.

  • Gartner – Source
    • By 2020, a Corporate “No-Cloud” Policy Will Be as Rare as a “No-Internet” Policy Is Today”
    • … organizations are saving 14 percent of their budgets as an outcome of public cloud adoption, according to Gartner’s 2015 cloud adoption survey
    • By 2020, more compute power will have been sold by IaaS and PaaS cloud providers than sold and deployed into enterprise data centers.
  • KPMG – Source
    • The question is no longer: ‘How do I move to the cloud?’ Instead, it’s ‘Now that I’m in the cloud, how do I make sure I’ve optimized my investment and risk exposure?
    • Cloud continues to drive disruption in the business world across the globe. In fact, a recent global KPMG survey 800 technology industry leaders ranked cloud as the technology that will have the greatest impact in driving business transformation for enterprises.

Continue reading Quantifying Cloud Adoption – Is It Really Happening?

Cloud – Are You Already Falling Behind?

Cloud – An Approach For Today And Not Just The Future!

Over the past 10 months, since I joined Microsoft, my eyes have been opened to the realities of the cloud.  In that time I have spoken to a large number of organizations who are fundamentally looking to the future.

In those discussions we have been discussing the future of their organizations and especially how they (as examples):

  • can improve their agility, lower their overall costs and help them become greener organizations;
  • will adapt to the coming 4th industrial revolution and what they need to consider to ensure their organization remains relevant. I even took time out to write about the role IoT will play in that;
  • will be able to put the most robust security and privacy in place in the face of increasingly sophisticated attackers;
  • can reduce the costs associated with dev/test in particular;

What I have seen, and heard, has convinced me that there is a massive shift happening towards the public/sovereign cloud and towards hybrid cloud (will reference both just as the cloud in the rest of this post). No doubt organizations are now moving, looking to move or thinking of moving major infrastructure and systems to the cloud. I am not speaking hypothetically here but as a matter of fact! Some are moving slower than others but eventually everyone will be there.

Continue reading Cloud – Are You Already Falling Behind?

The technology backbone of IOT – what’s needed from a platform POV and how to think about it

As previously stated there is a tremendous opportunity created by the fourth industrial revolution and the technologies powering it such as ubiquitous connectivity, big data, analytics and the cloud which combines to enable the “internet of things” (IoT).

Already we are seeing organizations go “all-in” and accelerate. Examples include Schneider Electric and Rolls Royce who are pivoting today for the future. We are also seeing IoT projects having a material impact on society such as the example of a combination of partners coming together in Nigeria to transform lives by making electricity delivery more reliable through IoT.

What each of these organizations have in common is a recognition that their existing technology needed to be augmented to help them better leverage the opportunities of the future and deliver the new services and optimized experiences that will enable them to thrive.

In this vein, progressive organizations and governments have begun building a next generation digital software platform that is:

  • able to span the IoT spectrum, from the things they want to connect to the actions they want to drive;
  • able to provide the connectivity to communicate with the things in BOTH directions for the purpose of command and control;
  • able to handle the data acquisition, storage and management of vast quantities of data at good speed and economically sensible and scaling price points;
  • able to deliver a strong analytics underpinning that supports the very latest cognitive technologies as well as machine learning and statistical approaches to derive intelligence, foster usage and drive more educated business decisions and actions;
  • able to enable the development of web, desktop or mobile applications and/or delivery of out of the box reporting;
  • able to seamlessly support the connection to productivity, ERP and other SaaS applications to drive action and close the loop automatically;
  • able, as a core priority, to deliver end-to-end integrated security. We live in a world where trust and privacy are paramount and the weakest link is often “add-ons” not originally designed to work together.

Let’s go deeper on a few of these important areas to consider  when building a next generation digital software platform that is IOT ready:

Sensors and Security

IoT projects inherently need sensors on physical things monitoring and interacting with the physical environment via a digital twin. The most exposed parts of an IoT enabled digital software platform are often the physical things and specifically:

  • the software running on the thing – how secure is it;
  • how data is handled on the thing – how is it locally stored and securely transmitted;
  • how secure exchange and execution of command and control is handled with the thing;
  • how identification and authentication happens to prevent spoofing or other issues.

Security of any next generation digital software platform is paramount and there is much ground to cover. There is a helpful blog post on How Microsoft engineers for IoT security and you can read the whitepaper Securing Your Internet of Things from the Ground Up.

Cloud based

So called smart things are generally always connected, always on and always generating data. The incoming data requires ongoing evaluation to deliver the level of service people will expect and the amount of data will continue to grow.

This implies that the platform must be:

  • universally accessible – things move. Your services need to keep working no matter what;
  • secure and reliable – nothing will turn off the next generation more than lax security or poor reliability;
  • able to scale quickly – you never know when the next “big” thing might hit. Look at “Pokemon Go”. Imagine if this was your service exploding into life. You need to ensure you can scale up and, when interest in that service wanes, scale down based on demand.

The only way to deliver that, unless you want to run huge budgets on non-value add in-house IT services, is through a cloud based approach which guarantees accessibility, reliability and speed.

Complete and agile

The next generation digital software platform must support end to end development and integration of systems of intelligence, which power these new smart “things” and their services.  The platform needs to have the capabilities you need in one place pre-integrated. Time to market is critical, as is security, and patchwork integration is the brake and risk multiplier you cannot afford. The platform must also be agile and flexible so that you can change according to market shifts.

Pulling it all together and getting started

The idea of a next generation digital platform with such capabilities might sound dramatic but the opportunities it brings are huge. The next generation digital platform will provide the technical foundation to launch new companies and services or revitalize existing ones. But, where to begin?

Microsoft offers an IoT QuickStart Program with guidance on where to start. The program offers a real-world plan to suit unique needs you may have, focused on the issues you want to tackle and the services you want to deliver, so you can start transformation immediately and progressively. The end goal is clear but how you get there depends on many things in the local contextual environment.

In the next article I will discuss a little of how to get the enterprise ready for the shift and how to ensure they come along with you on the journey. Thanks for reading!