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ICT CLOUD

Thinking cloud? Think again!
Thinking cloud? Think again!

By Lee Syse, Senior Cloud Solutions Architect - Cloud Providers at VMware SSA

t might have been around as a concept not the starting point. Without knowledge of what it can do for your business, cloud will never
for more than a decade but for many live up to its ideal, but simply be a place to repeat mistakes in a slightly different way.
Iorganisations, cloud computing is now So, if you are thinking about going to the cloud, think again.
becoming key to the way they can actually
deliver their business. Others, however, are From cloud-centric to app-centric
joining the ‘cloud club’ – often, it seems, Today, businesses must recognise the problems they are likely to encounter tomorrow. They
without really knowing why. They just want need to understand what the digital and application landscape is going to look like in three to
cloud. The problem is, they are finding it five years and make decisions accordingly. Data is going to be everywhere, with the volume
is not as simple as they thought. It’s not created, captured, copied, and consumed annually worldwide set to more than double in the
just the next place to ‘run your stuff’, but a next three years. And increasingly, it is going to be residing anywhere but the traditional
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whole new world of opportunities. data centre.
Cloud should not be about making This is going to have a major influence on how companies engage with customers, and
the same mistakes you already made in turn how they use apps to facilitate these interactions. That’s why rushing into cloud now
but cheaper somewhere else, it should could well hamper how effectively business-critical apps that need to use distributed data in
be about learning from the past, righting the future, can operate. An app that does great things now, for example, is going to need to
those wrongs and doing things differently. adapt over time, and the environment it is hosted in will need to do the same. An app that’s
The bottom line is that nearly been deployed somewhere just because it’s in the cloud could well struggle to meet those
everyone is behind the curve on using requirements. So ‘app-first’ rather than ‘cloud-first’ is your first strategic guiding light.
the cloud, and the opportunities it Then there’s the challenge that, even as they rush to the cloud, many organisations are
presents. In the EU, only a third of still unpicking their legacy infrastructure, technology they’ve probably held on to for longer
businesses are in the cloud. Given than they should because frankly, it was so resource-intensive implementing it they didn’t
the seismic acceleration of the digital feel they could cut their losses earlier and didn’t have an exit plan. From spiraling costs to
economy in 2020, it is inevitable that this deploying environments without first considering how apps are going to use them, there is a
percentage will change as businesses try real risk of experiencing the same problems that legacy IT created, just somewhere else this
to create new, app-first business models. time - in the cloud.
They’re doing this to capture market Ultimately, however, the biggest issue is that there isn’t one silver bullet. When we talk
share and to build stronger relationships about cloud, we’re actually talking about a whole variety, from companies running apps on-
with customers; cloud will play a major prem in their data centres, through software-as-a-service (SaaS)apps like Salesforce and
role in that success, enabling the right Workday, even app components as a service like communications, to the public clouds of
apps to run in the right environments, to the likes of Google and Amazon, all the way to highly distributed ‘edge clouds’. There are
deliver the right experiences. even sector-specific clouds, such as the financial sector developing a FinTech cloud, with
It’s the way the world is going: digitally all the compliance and security controls required for a highly regulated sector. CIOs expect
transformed organisations are projected to the number of clouds – private, public and edge environments – they use to build, manage
contribute to more than half of the global and run their apps to increase by 53% in the next three years. This proliferation brings
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GDP by 2023, accounting for $53.3 trillion. 1 with it complexity – a VMware study noted that 63% of organisations state inconsistencies
But adopting cloud solutions and between clouds as one of the top multi-cloud challenges. 4
services without really knowing why
you need them for your IT, and more To business-centric, for any app, over any cloud
importantly what they deliver for the This is why it’s so important to understand what cloud will do for the business as a whole,
business, is probably not the right strategy. and specifically how the business can use cloud services to develop, modernise and
Simply wanting to join the cloud club is deploy apps as fast and securely as possible. Just imagine what a business could achieve

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