Page 9 - EngineerIt June 2021

ICT CLOUD

and operations, thus reducing complexity, risk and total cost of ownership.
But businesses need a fast and simple path to the cloud, and the flexibility to choose
any cloud. Organisations can match the needs of each app to the optimal cloud, with the
freedom to use the most powerful cloud services and app modernisation, and to be able to
deliver cloud migration without the cost, complexity or risk of refactoring.

The right environments for the right apps
But what does that look like in practice? Here’s a handful of scenarios:
• You’re a public health provider, with a variety of systems, services and applications
that serve patients and employees. Some services, such as appointment booking
apps, the front ends of digital workspace platforms and entertainment networks for
in-patients, might quite happily sit in a public cloud; but patient data, the interface that
Lee Syse controls and secures your connected generators and other utilities, may need to be
on-premises, some in edge devices, with much higher levels of security.
• You’re a multi-national bank, one of the new challenger brands. Your whole selling point
if it didn’t matter what cloud its apps were is that you are customer-first, with an intuitive app that acts as a window to consumers’
in because they could use the same tools financial services. Again, to manage scale and agility, the front-end of that app will
to manage everything? happily sit in a public cloud, but the data it collects may need to be securely stored in
What you should be doing now is either a private cloud or on-premises. It may need to be the latter to comply with financial
“Application Portfolio Planning”. This regulatory and compliance legislation, along with legislation surrounding data sovereignty.
means looking at every application and • You’re a retailer gathering lots of customer data. You’re gaining insights from it in the
working out the roadmap for it – does cloud with large scale ML, and using that to then train artificial intelligence models that
it stay? Do you rewrite it locally or in the run in-store to interact with shoppers’ mobile phones in near real-time, providing help,
cloud? Do you migrate it to run on a cloud? advice and guidance (such as price comparison) to customers.
Do you just bin it and move to SaaS? • You’re a logistics provider with a new e-commerce service that allows customers to
Don’t plan based on where something is book online. During the traditional peak season, you manage the increased demand by
or what it runs on – that’s bottom up. Plan moving the front end services onto a public cloud, ensuring you have the speed, scale
based on what it does now and what you and resources to stop the app from toppling over. Once the demand drops off, you scale
want it to do in the future. the app back into a private cloud where you can maybe better control the operating
Why? Because it is the app that is costs, while still keeping the service available to customers. Maybe you then consider
the gold in the digital economy. Just think, moving it all to the cloud in future, or maybe it’s already all in one cloud, but that cloud
the number of applications has increased provider is now suddenly a competitor and you want to relocate it to a different cloud.
six-fold in recent years, and by 2024 more
than three-quarters of a billion applications These are all examples of how businesses are using the array of environments at their
will be developed. The cloud is thus the disposal to operate more effectively. While there’s always going to be variation between
developer platform, the security blanket, different businesses, having a cloud foundation that provides the freedom to enjoy a true
and the enabler; the foundation both for multi cloud strategy, running apps on more than one cloud is the goal, and it is the hybrid
modernising existing apps and developing cloud, providing consistent infrastructure, management and operations between the
tomorrow’s next-gen applications. That’s private and public clouds and where apps can easily be moved with no modifications, that
what cloud should be about - providing the will deliver that vision.
environment and the options CIOs need
to drive the full-scale modernisation of A hybrid cloud future
their business, delivering the operational This hybrid cloud future is unavoidable, yet those businesses that are blinded by the lure of
capabilities demanded of digital businesses, the cloud could end up recreating many of the issues they were attempting to get away from.
and building and hosting applications in Your business goals should always be your starting point for any project. Then you should
a way that is future-proofed. That means assess how a digital strategy will deliver it, underpinned by the right environments, including
delivering modern apps at the speed the cloud. A mix of clouds that are transparent, secure and potentially interchangeable to meet
business demands, operating them across the needs of apps, and more importantly users, both now and in the future, is essential.
any cloud, with the flexibility to run apps The cloud should be about liberating and elevating your applications and their
in the data centre, at the edge or in any architecture, not just building them again in a different silo somewhere else.
cloud, and driving rapid transformation while The businesses that take this approach to the cloud will be the ones that build the
delivering resilience and security, in what is environments their apps need, deliver the experiences users are demanding, and ultimately
an unpredictable world. take advantage of the data-driven economy.
This is all made possible through Thinking cloud? It’s time to think again. n
a single platform optimised for all
applications: virtualised and containerised, References
artificial intelligence and machine learning, 1. https://keyvatech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/IDC-2020-Futures.pdf
traditional and modern. A platform that can 2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/871513/worldwide-data-created/
be used across all clouds, from private to 3. https://blogs.vmware.com/emea/af/2020/05/how-multi-cloud-is-central-to-the-way-the-world-will-shop/
hyperscaler, with consistent infrastructure 4. https://cloud.vmware.com/community/2020/03/12/new-report-app-modernization-multi-cloud-world/

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