Jump Into The Cloud With Confidence

Table Of Contents

Jumping Into the Cloud

Clouds, Clouds, Clouds – Public, Private, and Hybrid

The Four Journey Stages to the Cloud & Who Is Involved

Choosing the Right Cloud Partner 11 Things You Should Know About Your Partner

Cloud Transformation in Action – a Case Study

Jumping Into The Cloud

Cloud is getting lots of attention these days. Cloud is a transformational platform

that can support the opportunities of today’s digital business being shaped and

driven by mobile, social, IoT (Internet of Things), Big Data and other forces. Cloud

Computing not only is a powerful agent of change, but it also can accelerate

transformation.

The benefits are big. “Cloud computing is a disruptive phenomenon, with the

potential to make IT organizations more responsive than ever,” says research firm

Gartner. “Cloud computing promises economic advantages, speed, agility,

flexibility,infinite elasticity an dinnovation.” As a result, more and more enterprises

are moving to the cloud. According to Gartner, 78 percent of enterprises are

planning to increase their investment in cloud through 2017.

Cloud Is Getting Lots Of Attention These Days.

Clouds, Clouds, Clouds

According to Intel, IT professionals often think in terms of cloud infrastructure

(public, private, and hybrid cloud). Business decision makers may be more focused

on the type of service to be delivered: InfrastructureasaService (IaaS),

PlatformasaService (PaaS), or SoftwareasaService (SaaS). By aligning the two

perspectives, enterprises can start to articulate an ideal cloud strategy. Companies

also need to think about processes, available skills and organizational structure to

support the transformation.

Cloud Is Typically Discussed In Two Contexts:

Public, Private and Hybrid

What infrastructure it’s built on. How it will be used.

ServiceIntermediation

ServiceAggregation

ServiceArbitrage

CloudBroker

Cloud Provider

Cloud ServiceManagement

BusinessSupport

Provisioning/Configuration

Portability/Interoperability

Service Layer

Resource Abstraction andControl Layer

Physical Resource Layer

Hardware

Facility

SecurityAudit

PrivacyImpact Audit

PerformanceAudit

SasS

PaaS

IaaS

Service OrchestrationCloud

Consumer

CloudAuditor

Secu

rity

Priv

acy

Cloud Carrier

The Four Journey Stages to the Cloud & Who Is Involved

Focused On:• Designing and developing the approach for cloud.• Conducting Proof of Concepts.• Finding the right cloud fit and discovering the great benefits that the cloud can provide for your business.

Who Is Involved: Technology Architects; Development, Testing, and Operations Group Managers; Head of Engineering; Head of Testing; Head of Operations; Head of Infrastructure; and Chief of Architecture are some of the people involved in this stage.

Focused On:• Large-scale move to the cloud.• Implementing cloud adoption, architecture support and managed services• Changing engineering approach to DevOps Software Development and Combined Engineering

methodologies that help accelerate speed to market and streamline the process of migrating applications to the cloud, as well as make applications more ‘cloud-ready’.

• According to SearchCloudComputing, “When a cloud DevOps project is undertaken properly, development and operations teams will be able to collaborate to make applications function effectively in the cloud and, in the process, permanently alter how an organization’s business and IT units function.”

Who Is Involved: Many of the same people who were involved in Stage 1. Additionally, significant go-to-market decisions need to be made involving vice presidents, business owners, CIOs, and CTOs.

Stage 2Implementation

Stage 1Finding the Right Cloud Fit

Focused On:• Nurturing your applications and cloud deployments by scaling up, monitoring important applications,

automating key processes, and enhancing delivery with DevOps.

Who Is Involved: Many of the same people who were involved in Stage 1.

Focused On:• Optimizing your delivery speed and quality, while cutting costs.• Excel with your applications in the cloud by using DevOps methodologies and a “cloud-first” approach.

Who Is Involved: This stage often involves teams from the prior stages, as well as senior and C-level executives.

Stage 4Living, Breathing and Managing Life in the Cloud

Stage 3Nurturing Stage

Choosing the Right Partner to Jump Into the CloudAs with any emerging technology that touches all aspects of a business, moving

to the cloud often involves partners. Not all clouds are created equal – nor are all

vendors. Here is a checklist for selecting a cloud-centric trusted partner to help

you succeed in the cloud:

1. A partner that has hands-on experience with end-to-end services in the Four Key Cloud Stages

outlined above.

• That has both business acumen and the technological expertise to understand where you

want to take your business. Knows how to find the right cloud fit for your enterprise as well

as establish realistic strategies.

• That can implement and provide architecture support, migration support, and managed

services. Your partner should also be capable of automating key processes.

• That can provide support once you’re on the cloud, including monitoring applications.

2. That is fluent in all the major cloud platforms — Amazon® Web Services, Microsoft® Azure™,

VMware® and emerging technologies.

3. That really knows applications. A partner that can move your applications from legacy

architecture and infrastructures to new-age cloud architectures – and support you at every

stage. Not every application is a good candidate for cloud; a good partner will know what apps

belong in the cloud and in what type of cloud – hybrid, public or private.

4. That has a track record of delivering solutions that are reliable, scalable (up or down as needed),

secure and resource efficient.

5. That has the available trained talent; does the partner have certified cloud architects, cloud

engineers, cloud support professionals on staff?

6. That knows how to implement security – at every layer.

7. That has expertise in governance and governmental regulatory guidelines.

8. That has an arsenal of transformational tools -- DevOps and other methodologies, best

practices and automation techniques for cloud application development – and a culture of

“DevOps”.

DevOps is no longer just an option but is a mandatory approach, especially for digital

businesses. According to Gartner, “a digital enterprise is likely to face the challenge of the

three V’s (volume, velocity and variety) much more intensely than a traditional enterprise. The

key stakeholders of a digital enterprise will demand a highly agile I&O (Infrastructure &

Operations) that can match the speed of change, the speed of new releases, and the speed of

new service models and delivery models. Therefore, I&O leaders for organizations that are

striving to succeed in a highly competitive environment must plan to start their DevOps

journey now.”

9. That has global cross-border experience. Industry leaders are leveraging cloud technology to

adapt quickly their business models and infrastructures to minimize risk and take advantage of

cross-border market opportunities. Your partner should know how to:

• Extend your private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructure across borders.

• Maintain data security across national borders.

• Manage a multi-geo cloud infrastructure.

10. That has strong testing capabilities for applications in the cloud. “When you move applications

into the cloud, you have to test thoroughly end-toend from multiple standpoints, not just

features and functions,” says Beyondsoft’s Natarajan. “You need to test performance, loads,

usability.”

11. That can train your staff and transfer knowledge and processes to your organization.

SummaryWhether it is your first venture or taking new directions in the

cloud, it can be a daunting prospect. But the rewards are great

for those who take the journey by creating a road map,

selecting the right cloud platform, and partnering with the

right vendor to bring you to the ‘last mile.’

Cloud Transformation Case Study

One of the world’s largest auto manufacturers with multiple, high-volume consumer

web sites and microsites for their various auto brands is seeking to move their

services into the cloud for agility, elasticity and cost efficiency. With the

hyper-competitive auto marketplace moving at the speed of the Internet, the

manufacturer’s business teams felt that the legacy infrastructure was not keeping

up with the needs of the business.

The Customer

The initial challenge was to find the right, end-to-end path to the cloud so that the

company didn’t choke on the implementation. They needed to be able to

determine the right cloud configuration, prepare their services and data for the

migration, implement the migration, re-optimize the services for the cloud and

grow, all in a seamless fashion without disrupting operations and customer

interactions. The web apps to be migrated are complex, core marketing websites

for the automobile manufacturer that have to be highly available and scale with the

end-user traffic. Core requirements included:

• The content of the website be region based with about 29 regions.

• The content for each region be maintained by separate marketing teams that

need the ability to manage and publish the content in a secure, timely and

storage constraint free manner.

• The content needs to be stored on a highly scalable, available, durable and secure

infrastructure.

• This solution needs to be a hybrid cloud solution where the applications securely

integrate with multiple, core backend on-premise services.

• Cost is one of the primary reasons for the migration, so the applications and the

databases must be able to scale out/in as needed.

• Since these are core services, the applications and databases also have to be

highly available, and the disaster recovery solutions need to meet the enterprise

requirements.

• Because multiple vendors develop different parts of the applications, multiple

developers are often involved in the development process. The solution must

include a continuous integration and deployment framework, so that the

manufacturer can innovate and iterate quickly.

• Security has to be part of every layer.

The Challenges

Over the past five years leading up to the decision to move to a full-scale cloud

deployment, Beyondsoft provided managed services for the manufacturer’s huge

fleet of about 200 EC2 instances on the AWS Cloud. The EC2 instances supported

microsites for multiple business teams within the enterprise. Each one was an

independent site managed by the Beyondsoft Managed Services team. The team

was able to manage such a large number of independent instances through

CloudFormation and Ansible, as well as applying DevOps principles in real-time.

The Solution

The first step was to find the appropriate cloud architecture to support the client’s

business. Based on the success of dipping their toes in the AWS Clold water, i.e.

experiencing first hand the flexibility, agility, fine grain security controls and cost

savings provided by the AWS cloud, along with the Beyondsoft team capabilities,

the customer took the next step and engaged Triaxil’s to implement the migration

of most of their existing core services, around 100+ workloads, to the cloud. The

project started with Triaxil’s application portfolio discovery process that helped

identify the initial two applications to migrate.

Triaxil then created the cloud architecture and provisioned the requisite

infrastructure on the cloud, using a combination of AWS and Azure cloud services.

The new cloud environment provided the agility and flexibility necessary to support

a digital transformation process that enabled the manufacturer’s marketing teams

to push content on demand creating highly individualized and highly engaging

customer experiences on the manufacturer’s B2C web sites.

Azure Active Directory services were used to manage both single signon

authentication and content management, adding several layers of security to the

applications. Content was also restricted using Amazon S3 buckets, further

protecting the customer’s key assets. Triaxil also implemented DevOps principles

like continuous integration and deployment that improved the quality and speed of

delivery for these applications. Currently, two of the key core enduser web

applications are being migrated to AWS, and one of the core authentication

services is being migrated to Azure.

Find & Implement

Once the services are successfully launched in the cloud, the next step is to

optimize the services to take advantage of cloud technologies, as well as implement

a scalable migration framework to migrate the remaining core services. The Triaxil

team has helped the manufacturer migrate their development to DevOps and some

of the core principles are already in practice, like: continuous integration and

deployment, infrastructures as code, version control via source code management

systems, continuous monitoring & logging. Currently, Traixil leads the migration of

two publicfacing websites to AWS as well as authentication service to Azure. The

team has been able to meet and exceed these requirements.

Nurture & Engineer

Thinking of Jumping Into the Cloud? With Triaxil You Can Do That With Confidence.

When we talk about moving to the cloud, we are really talking

about all the elements and processes to move, lift and shift to the

cloud and then do engineering to optimize the services on the

cloud, which is what enterprises want,” says Ezhilarasan (Ez)

Natarajan, Vice President and Head of Cloud Services at Traxil.

“The cloud holds real value and the future for enterprises.

Companies, however, wrestle with how best to move to the cloud.

Our focus is to help customers translate complex and divergent

enterprise needs into innovative, highimpact cloud solutions.

“

”

Traixil provides endtoend solutions and services for public, private and hybrid

cloud platform business models. By supporting some of the largest cloud

providers – including Alibaba®, Amazon®, CenturyLink®, Google®,

Microsoft®, Tencent®, VMware®, and Xen® – Beyondsoft has proven

technologies and methodologies to help customers develop cloud strategies,

move to the cloud and prosper on the cloud.

Contact Traixil at (877) 896-5859 or visit www.Triaxil.com to learn more.

1. Gartner – “Trending Topic: Cloud Computing,” website, September 2015.

2. Gartner – 2014 Cloud Survey.

3. ITPro – “Top 10 business reasons to move to the cloud,” February 21, 2013.

4. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) -- US Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap Volume I, Special Publication 500-293, October 2014.

5. Intel – “10 Things IT Needs to Know about Cloud,” 2014.

6. TechTarget SearchCloudComputing – “A successful cloud DevOps project requires new ways of thinking,” September 2015.

7. Gartner “Ride the New Digital Wave With Public Cloud, DevOps and Automation,” Naveen Mishra and Tapati Bandopadhyay, February 13, 2015.

Sources