Why Cloud Migration is Gaining Traction for Enterprise Applications
By Jean S. Bozman
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the momentum to move enterprise applications to the cloud is gaining speed. Many companies want to consolidate systems in their own data centers, migrating more of their longtime data-center applications into the hybrid cloud – and into multi-cloud deployments, as well. The change is often beneficial – reducing on-premises CapEX costs and supporting more IT flexibility and business agility.
However, customers are finding that a cloud-first strategy is causing them to reinvent many of their long-standing control and data-governance practices. They’re changing the way they deploy and enterprise applications, many of which are being rewritten to support software containers and Kubernetes orchestration.
Business practices are changing, too. A cloud-first strategy requires deep thought about the “who, what, when, where and why” of developing and deploying enterprise applications. Dave McCarthy, Research Vice President at IDC for cloud infrastructure, told a recent CIO Future of Cloud Summit conference that cloud migrations aren’t about “lift and shift” anymore. Instead, many cloud migrations focus on application modernization to speed development and deployment of functionality that provides new business value. The new software – often leveraging open-source code, containers, and Kubernetes orchestration – can be updated more quickly, keeping pace with rapidly changing business conditions.
What’s Changing at Customer Sites
CIO’s Future of Cloud Summit online conference (April 11-13, 2022) shed light on how significant cloud migrations of enterprise applications are being done in 2022. Speakers from Wells Fargo N.A., Rockwell Automation, DISH Network, Priceline.com and BNY Mellon shared their customer experiences about what it takes to do large-scale cloud migrations – and what the business benefits are.
Most organizations took their first “bite” of the cloud during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, they haven’t eaten the whole meal – yet. The pace of cloud migrations accelerated in 2020, as office personnel moved to work-from-home (WFH) environments due to COVID-19 lockdowns. To save on costs, many companies moved to consolidate expensive data-center systems in 2021 and 2022.
In the process, most have found that the cloud-migration process isn’t as simple as swiping a credit-card to “stand up” new applications running in public-cloud infrastructure.
That was then, and this is now. Here’s what’s changing in cloud migrations in 2022:
Application Modernization: Organizations are investing in sharpening their development skill-sets, by providing more training for programmers, IT staffers and sys admins. Readiness to re-write enterprise applications is rewarded by the flexibility to deploy in the cloud – and to add compute and storage resources by “tapping” cloud provider infrastructure. One consequence of this is the ability to reduce on-premises infrastructure, saving on data center “real estate,” power and cooling costs, and systems hardware budgets.
Adding Automation: Cloud migration deployments can go faster when a degree of automation is applied to repetitive tasks. This doesn’t mean that sys admins are not hands-on to install, troubleshoot and maintain cloud infrastructure. However, using AI-based software to detect code flaws, and to identify inconsistencies in security software or storage software, allows IT staffers to work faster as they review code to “flag” code that should be modified or replaced. Here, cloud service providers (CSPs) and ISVs (software vendors) have AI-enabled automation that supports cloud DevOps.
IT Flexibility: Cloud technology is allowing customers to scale up workloads as demand increases – and to burst into cloud resources, as needed. But companies are finding that they must create well-thought-out business policies and well-honed IT best practices to achieve the flexibility to make it all work – confirming to up-to-date security standards, data governance, data protection and geographically-based data privacy regulations.
Control and Governance: Cloud-first strategies are leading customers to reinvent many long-standing control and data-governance practices, leading to consistent deployments in hybrid clouds. Many are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) software tools to “discover” flaws in security software that would lead to cyberattacks and ransomware attacks. The damage from is often discovered weeks or months after the initial breach, while the malware “waits” inside systems before disrupting operations and causing downtime.
Customer Experiences
Customers in the retail, financial services, and health care markets spoke to those changes in how cloud computing is applied in the enterprise. Here are “snapshots” from a few of the customers who spoke at the CIO Future of Cloud Summit, commenting on cloud migrations -- and the business value they can bring:
Wells Fargo N.A.
Wells Fargo N.A. is leveraging two public clouds – Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), in addition to using dedicated cloud services (private clouds) running in the bank’s own data centers. “By the end of 2027, we’re looking to have roughly 60% of our workloads in the cloud,” including public and private (dedicated) clouds, said Christopher Marsh-Bourdon, head of hybrid environments for Wells Fargo Bank, N.A.
Key goals for Wells Fargo’s application modernization projects for the cloud include ensuring zero-trust security with multi-factor authentication (MFA); bursting into cloud infrastructure for additional capacity; leveraging third-party code for faster application development; and re-training staffers to develop, deploy and manage software-defined workloads.
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DISH Networks
Attila Tinic, executive vice president and CIO of DISH Networks, told the conference attendees that cloud is an enabler of rapid change that accelerates the business’ adoption of new technologies. DISH Networks has adopted a cloud-first approach for multiple business units, including the company’s Sling TV Services; its Boost mobile service; and its new 5G-enabled wireless network, which is fully cloud-native.
“Cloud is an enabler of rapid change,” Tinic said. ”We are making sure that we’re keeping up with the pace at which the technology is moving.” To do that, cloud instances can be “spun up” in a sandbox environment, supporting rapid development of new application functionality. Then, IT staffers do a rapid assessment of the new functionality – followed by deployment into production environments.
On a parallel track to internally developed applications, software providers are increasingly finding ways to modernize their platforms to become cloud-native, adapting to new types of customer requirements. This brings cloud-enablement to many enterprise applications that have been used for many years in customer sites.
Summing up the flexibility that cloud services bring, Tinic said, “the overall cloud environment is supporting the development of an open ecosystem of solutions . . . where we can replace components relatively easily, as technology evolves.”
That approach helps customers to avoid vendor lock-in for cloud services – ensuring choice for the broad selection of technology providers that are addressing a kaleidoscope of changing business requirements.
BNY Mellon
BNY Mellon is modernizing many of its enterprise applications and deploying them to run on public clouds and private clouds (dedicated clouds inside the bank’s data centers).
As a highly regulated entity, the bank is modernizing its applications while adhering to its well-established corporate policies and complying with the banking regulations that have always applied to banks and financial institutions in the U.S. – and around the world.
The bank’s migration of selected applications into the hybrid cloud is providing business value, said Joseph Sieczkowski, CIO of Architecture and Engineering for BNY Mellon, speaking at the CIO Future of Cloud Summit conference. “Essentially, the cloud enables us to leverage the cloud’s economy of scale, to drive business value, to lower risk, to increase resiliency – and to ensure that the infrastructure is evergreen.”
Key Takeaways
These customer examples – and many more – show that 2022 is generating a new wave of cloud migration, including both public and private clouds. The companies that spoke at the CIO Future of Cloud Summit will not be alone in their efforts to move to the hybrid cloud, to multi-cloud deployments, and to cloud-native applications, where appropriate.
Cloud migrations are no longer “emerging technology.” They have become mainstream, customers who presented at the conference said. That’s why adoption of cloud-enabled applications is, indeed, widespread among businesses – and across industry verticals.
Dave McCarthy, IDC Research Vice President for Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Services, a keynote speaker at the conference, said IDC expects cloud migration and cloud adoption to become even more widespread, citing IDC predictions that:
Copyright 2022 by Jean S. Bozman. All rights reserved.
Transforming teams through enablement
2yJean Bozman great reference and a number of key topics that were brought up during the summit. One topic that I didn’t hear as much is training/cloud enablement for the internal teams. The ability to re-skill, up skill and bring new skills to an organization that accelerates cloud adoption is at this point one of the critical topics that if not addressed early becomes a barrier of realizing the true potential of cloud.