The CTO at a major financial services company once told Accenture about being kept awake at night by the thought of replacing decades-old IT with cloud-based systems. The CTO was concerned about how staff members would handle the change. “This is massive for us,” he said. “I need to know how my people will react.”
That CTO and others like him are under pressure as their cloud projects grow to encompass legacy systems, multiple clouds and more users. Lift-and-shift migrations have been joined by more complicated activities such as mainframe modernisation and data centre exits.
Someone who knows more than most about the headaches these projects are causing CIOs and CTOs is Mike Reddie, VMware's Senior Director of Cloud in Australia and New Zealand, and his colleagues in the Accenture VMware Business Group. Reddie says many organisations underestimate the cost and complexity of this new phase of cloud IT.
"Because large organisations have such a diverse range of applications, there's a lot of influence from their different developer communities over the tools and platforms used to innovate. They may want to leverage the tools they're familiar with, or perhaps they want access to the latest AI or ML technology. Maybe they want to build an IoT app using a particular cloud because they have experience with it or because it has a unique capability they’re interested in using," Reddie says.
“The concept of running your application in the specific cloud that’s the best fit for it is becoming a very compelling and more common practice for enterprise organisations,” he adds.
As a result, large companies might have “multiple clouds for, say, business productivity or for IaaS services or for data analytics,” Reddie points out.
This requires operating models to be rearchitected, as well as people who are skilled to work with multiple cloud environments. There are security and network architecture challenges, software licensing challenges, compliance challenges, and different camps within IT departments usually pull in different directions. “At some point on their cloud journey most businesses will get into a tangle,” Reddie says.
Today’s uncertain business climate can also throw a spanner in cloud plans. “What you plan for today will probably be different in a year's time, and a year after that,” Reddie says.
Clients are telling him, “You need to make this cloud journey easier for us. We don't want to throw away everything we've got and start again.”
Simplifying the multicloud journey
Flexibility is key to streamlining cloud, Reddie points out. “Our vision is that running the application in the cloud that best suits it, becomes as easy as possible,” he says. “And that's not just from a technology perspective; optimal operations, security, and networking are all front of mind in the way we've built our cloud portfolio.
"Ease of automation and operations and the ability to move workloads freely, without being 'locked in' to the choices that you made today, is becoming of key importance for customers."
Rather than building cloud silos, Reddie says the aim should be to “build consistent operations, consistent development and consistent security and policy across all of these different technology areas.”
Accenture's Managing Director of Infrastructure Engineering, Al Auda, explains that cloud migration is a business and cultural change as much as a technological one and organisations that fail to understand this will struggle.
“Cloud is the area where IT and the business really need to come together. It’s not just about pushing workloads or applications into the cloud – the culture has to change along with it. That translates to a lot of different disciplines and organisations within a company.”
Certain building blocks should be in place before an organisation embarks on a multicloud journey. Business leaders should be asking, “Are we organised properly internally? Is the business in the frame? Do we understand our applications enough that we strategise and modernise into ‘the new’ in the next three or five years? Do I need to go skill my people?”
That broad approach is reflected by the Accenture VMware Business Group, which Auda describes as a “one stop shop” to solving challenges in a multi cloud world. It helps clients develop a roadmap to cloud which encompasses everything from hiring and application architecture to business agility and innovation cycles.
These roadmaps also encompass the full scope of hybrid IT environments, from on-premise and edge IT to private and public clouds – and the need for governance of it all.
And they take into account the need to make it simpler for CIOs to know what’s happening in hybrid environments. Auda points to the importance of equipping IT leaders with a cloud control plane to help them stay in control.
"Do you need a single pane of glass that helps you look into services across your cloud estate? If you don't have that understood from the get go, you're going to struggle orchestrating between these clouds. So it's important to get these steps upfront to ensure that your multicloud journey is successful,” he comments
The financial services company mentioned at the start of this article had a 1.5 year-long multicloud journey which was ultimately successful. That’s because the CTO understood the importance of organisational readiness from the outset, Auda says.
"We spent lots of time to ensure that we really succeeded at adopting, measuring, and managing change for him, more so than a technology transformation,” Auda recalls. That work was the “highlight of the transformation program.”
Auda urges business leaders to revisit their multicloud playbook – from the automation scripts and reference architectures to the security and compliance guardrails – and ask themselves if they have the right strategy in place.
“Look under the covers, organisationally. Are you equipped skills wise? Are you organised in a proper operating model to perform and function in the context of multicloud? And really invite the business along to the journey if you haven't done that already. Have them be part of the governance council, have them be part of multicloud enablement programs, have them be part of your strategising around the new business models and products triggered by multicloud-diversified and modernised applications.”
Find out more about how the Accenture VMware Business Group can help you operationalise your transformation journey efficiently by contacting us or visiting us online.
