Navigating the Clouds - HCL Technologies · enterprise cloud strategy based on these directions....

Navigating the CloudsTools You Can Use

MAY 2011

© 2011, HCL Technologies. Reproduction Prohibited. This document is protected under Copyright by the Author, all rights reserved. 2

Navigating the Clouds: Tools You Can Use

Introduction

Cloud Computing is a disruptive change that promises the CIO a paradigm, offering faster time-to-market, improved operational costs and reduced fixed costs. As with any new technology, learning to play with the cloud requires a distinct set of tools and techniques that provide a systematic and quantitative view while you navigate through an array of cloud models, choices of vendors and plethora of platforms and services. The right set of tools can enable a smoother adoption through focused efforts in the right direction while still looking into the rear view mirror of security, compliance and governance. Through this whitepaper, we show how we apply systematic and quantitative methods to plan adoption roadmaps to maximize the potential value of cloud computing to an organization while minimizing risks.

Cloud has been defined by many in a number of ways. While every IT company has its own definition, let us define the cloud as a way to provide IT operations on an on-demand model. There are a couple of key factors that are promising and driving people to explore more about this phenomenon. At the top on that list, based on our interactions, is moving away from pay-and-amortize to pay-as-you-go model for financing IT in organization. For most companies, it enables to limit upfront expenditure in financially uncertain times, for others it provides faster innovation cycles by removing the procurement lag.

Given the variety of clouds available for IT, much like the ones in our own troposphere with each offering distinct advantages and its own set of risks, it is difficult to navigate the cloud without the right set of tools. There are various models such as consuming either infrastructure as a service or components such as database as a service or software as a service, or, alternatively, build or migrate an application using available platforms such as force.com. There are also location variances such as public, private, virtual private or hybrid environments as well as in-premise or outside-premise considerations.

From building cloud-ready applications to data conversions on-the-edge-of-cloud to bandwidth consumption and service reliability, there is plethora of issues that needs to be understood, evaluated and addressed by an organization. Rapidly evolving technology also means no clear consensus among providers and lack of interoperability. If you have already made significant investment in existing IT setup, it does not mean you should not be exploiting newer options that the cloud provides. It implies that you should be careful, do a thorough analysis systemically, channeling your efforts in the right areas and on the right set of business needs. This is easier said than done. While you are the best decision maker for your organization, do you have right set of tools and techniques that enable informed decision making?


Cloud Adoption Approach

Cloud adoption cycle is similar to other technology adoption cycles. The HCL recommended cloud adoption cycle is given below:

Explore: This is the initial phase where you are contemplating what should be done with the cloud and where you should start. You have heard about cloud and are trying to get more insight into the potential and its applicability to your enterprise.

Experiment: You have taken the first bold step to experiment with the technology. You have purchased licenses of Amazon Elastic Compute or Force.com or numerous other offerings. You have someone in your organization trying to create or port a sample application to these environments.

Adopt: You have adopted certain cloud technologies in your environment and have outlined the basic enterprise cloud strategy. You have one or more applications delivered from cloud or have your own private cloud environment.

Integrate: You have integrated the applications that are in-premise to your cloud ecosystem and have enabled an end-to-end business process. Your suppliers or partners also understand your cloud strategy and an integral part of it.

Govern: You have put the governance framework in place and are actively monitoring the quality of service. You have defined your exit strategies and how the hybrid environment will behave and evolve. You have modified your internal OLA and vendor SLA to account for cloud characteristics and nuances.

Evolve: You are now very mature and have learnt from a cycle of experiments. You factor cloud into your capacity planning discussions and are drafting a full-fledged enterprise cloud strategy based on these directions.

Retire: As time progresses, there will be some exits and some overhauls. Decommissioning of cloud providers and technologies from your environment will happen and will need to be planned for.




The Three Challenges

The First Step – CRI Analysis

There are three key challenges faced during the early stages of cloud adoption in the organization. These are visibility, value and technology.

The Visibility Challenge: In HCL’s experience, this is the most important challenge faced by an organization. There is a limited to zero visibility of IT assets, and the presence of “shadow IT” in the organization also does not help. When it comes to cloud, what helps is when the entire organization takes a collective view and moves in a common direction.

The Value Challenge: Increased pressure on IT to show its value to business and the benefits/ ROI on IT investments is dragging it out of the traditional comfort zone. This is leading to a limited to no increase in IT expenses, leaving little space for experimentation with new technologies. Again, it becomes important that available efforts be concentrated and channelized to maximize benefits.

The Technology Challenge: This challenge is intrinsic to the nature and impact of cloud computing. This is not just the next level of technology evolution, this is a paradigm shift in the way IT thinks and operates. Cloud computing aims to fulfill the promise SOA made of moving IT from “applications” to “services”. With cloud, “service” is a modus operandi and location and origin of service is no longer a material concern – assuming that the security and delivery models mature. The IT departments are yet to understand the extent of organization change management required to adopt cloud computing.

During each step, there are various nuances that need to be addressed. If you are reading this paper, it is quite likely that you are in either at the explore step or the experiment step. During this, you need a framework that can help guide you to select the right environment that is applicable for your enterprise, as well as, the right subset of IT portfolio where the energies should be channeled. While technology adoption requires initial investment and handholding, the current environment requires a different approach – one that can justify investment in creating an understanding via experimentation and obtaining the necessary expertise through parameters that are objective in nature and treat every computing asset using a similar set of lenses. The investment needs to be focused and have a well-defined roadmap with incremental steps so that mistakes can be avoided and risks can be mitigated.

For this analysis, Cloud Readiness Index (CRI) based approach will be apt. CRI is a patent pending framework developed by HCL that assesses the IT components across various dimensions. It keeps in view the desired state of the ‘to-be’ cloud view and algorithmically computes an index score for the component. Mathematical discussions aside, the CRI provides a way to calibrate multiple target cloud environments with respect to your IT portfolio and also identifies high, medium and low potential candidates in your IT environment that are likely to benefit from cloud technologies.



The image above shows CRI analysis for a customer’s portfolio of applications for target PaaS environments. An important aspect to understand is the sensitivity of CRI analysis to the current IT environment as well as target cloud environment. The image depicts a “production” environment. A CRI analysis performed on “development” environment may look drastically different.


Identifying the Cloud Environment

Cloud Evaluation Framework uses CRI analysis to determine the best suitable cloud environment for various IT environments e.g. production, development etc. It creates portfolio views and analyzes the affinity of each to provide recommendations. Below is a depiction of one of the portfolio views being analyzed for its affinity for selected IaaS and PaaS environments.

In addition to CEF analysis, critical factors should be analyzed to ensure the enterprise direction, as well as maximize the alignment with portfolio in question. Given that distributed hybrid portfolio will increase the governance overhead and will be an unsustainable first step for organizations with low governance maturity, a holistic view of combined portfolio should be considered to obtain critical portfolio mass.




Identifying the Pilot Candidates

Once you have chosen the target environment that you want to experiment and subsequently adopt in the enterprise using CRI analysis and Cloud Evaluation Framework, the next step is to identify pilot candidates for experimentation. It is critical that the chosen candidates represent a valid sample yet provide demonstrable value.

This is where CRV (CRI-Risk-Value) analysis is very useful. It marries the analysis tenets of risk and value with CRI analysis. CRI represents a quantitative readiness potential, is proportionate to costs for moving the application to cloud and is a good indicator before a detailed cost-benefit analysis can be carried out.

The CRV chart above shows candidates that are suitable for being Pilots. Typically, these are low-to-medium risk applications with high CRI and high value and are represented in the top-right corner. In the chart above, applications falling above Wave 1 are good pilots (as none of high risk applications are in wave 1 in this representative sample of customer portfolio).

Depending on the organization’s maturity on processes and tools and the state of readiness with respect to existing service providers and internal knowledge management, lines of Wave 1 and Wave 2 will shift. Ideally, Wave 1 candidates should not be more than 5% of the total portfolio being considered for a given target environment.

Applications that are high on value, low-to-medium on risk, but low on CRI are likely to be remediated before further action can be taken. CRI’s outlier analysis (as shown in CRI analysis picture earlier) can help identify the root-cause that is prohibiting the enterprise to realize the potential that exists in these applications. Such applications are likely to be re-engineered or replaced if the detailed cost benefit analysis vindicates the potential.


Assessing Governance Impact

While you move towards piloting cloud environments, many of the organization’s underlying IT artifacts will undergo a change. As each organization is unique, the impact on specific artifacts such as IT strategy and Enterprise Architecture is beyond the scope of this whitepaper. However, a critical aspect worth mentioning is the impact on governance.

The governance processes are fairly standardized across organizations and industry established standards are being used to varying degrees of maturity in almost all organizations. These processes will undergo modifications and changes to accommodate the impact of cloud computing and introduction of new considerations. While the impact will be different for each organization depending on the cloud environment to be adopted, the following image represents the impact on an organization looking to adopt hybrid cloud environment within the enterprise.

The impact will vary across models and environments, but it is important to understand the changes that will be required to enable successful adoption of cloud in the organization.

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© 2011, HCL Technologies. Reproduction Prohibited. This document is protected under Copyright by the Author, all rights reserved.

Other Scenarios

Summary

About the author

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While we have discussed various options to help you prepare better for the inevitable cloud journey, there are still a variety of scenarios that are not being addressed. For example, there are organizations looking to grow their own private clouds. Their journey will begin from bottom-up via putting relevant layers on virtualization. They are likely to benefit greatly from various cloud-enabling toolsets that HCL has developed while building its own private clouds. Another set of organizations looking to use cloud to make money, can use HCL’s cloud monetization framework. All these toolsets, migration and monetization frameworks are beyond the scope of the current paper.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. But that step has to be taken in the right direction. Cloud represents tremendous opportunity for achieving the promise of true service-based utility computing. However, the maze is complex continues to reconfigure itself. A systematic, comprehensive and objective analysis such as CRI can get you started in the right direction, putting your limited resources and energy into targeted applications that allow you to slowly mature into a leaner and agile enterprise.

Cloud adoption promises to be an interesting journey for an enterprise with its luring benefits of on-demand models enabling faster innovation cycles. It is our belief that such a journey should be undertaken in a systematic manner. At the time of writing this paper, SaaS remains the primary experiment model for a majority of enterprises. However, the key challenge will surface when we want to leverage cloud models while keeping existing investments in applications.

The changes required for cloud adoption are unique to your organization. Unless you address visibility and other challenges, you may be going in the wrong direction without knowing. Do not wait to ask for external help, when you are unsure. HCL, with its experiences with multiple customers across all cloud environments and proven framework, is a partner you can rely upon.

Rupak Rathore is a Principal Consultant with HCL Technologies’ Business and IT Transformation Services (BITS) practice and is the key innovator behind CRI and associated frameworks. Over the last 15 years, he has helped many customers use technology to deliver superior value to businesses. He can be reached at

The BITS arm of HCL aims to increase value of IT while reducing cost and mitigating risks associated with such transformation. HCL BITS provides consulting services across the globe and has many Global 1000 companies as its customers.

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HCL Technologies is a leading global IT services company, working with clients in the areas that impact and redefine the core of their businesses. Since its inception into the global landscape after its IPO in 1999, HCL focuses on ‘transformational outsourcing’, underlined by innovation and value creation, and offers an integrated portfolio of services including software led IT solutions, remote infrastructure management, engineering and R&D services and BPO. HCL leverages its extensive global offshore infrastructure and network of offices in 31 countries to provide holistic, multi-service delivery in key industry verticals including Financial Services, Manufacturing, Consumer Services, Public Services and Healthcare. HCL takes pride in its philosophy of ‘Employees First’ which empowers our 73,420 transformers to create real value for customers. HCL Technologies, along with its subsidiaries, had consolidated revenues of US$ 3.3 billion (Rs. 15,160 crores), as on 31 March 2011 (on LTM basis). For more information, please visit www.hcltech.com

ABOUT HCLHCL Technologies

HCL is a $5.9 billion leading global technology and IT enterprise comprising two companies listed in India - HCL Technologies and HCL Infosystems. Founded in 1976, HCL is one of India's original IT garage start-ups. A pioneer of modern computing, HCL is a global transformational enterprise today. Its range of offerings includes product engineering, custom & package applications, BPO, IT infrastructure services, IT hardware, systems integration, and distribution of information and communications technology (ICT) products across a wide range of focused industry verticals. The HCL team consists of over 80,000 professionals of diverse nationalities, who operate from 31 countries including over 500 points of presence in India. HCL has partnerships with several leading Global 1000 firms, including leading IT and Technology firms. For more information, please visit www.hcl.com

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Navigating the Clouds - HCL Technologies · enterprise cloud strategy based on these directions....

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