Journey to Modernization - How to Take the Next Step Toward Enterprise Hybrid Cloud

Eight out of ten enterprises, according to Gartner, will abandon their traditional data centers for public cloud, hosted private cloud, or co-location alternatives by 2025.¹ That prediction was given in 2019, before the pandemic.

For years, the industry has been moving in this direction, heading toward a subscription-based, cloud-centric operational model, where services are paid for as they are consumed. But the pandemic has accelerated this trend, illustrating in a very real way the importance of flexibility and agility, the need for lower operational costs, and the challenge of projecting future technology needs. As Gartner research vice president, Sid Nag, put it, “The pandemic validated cloud’s value proposition.”²

Journey to Modernization

To guide organizations in accelerating their Digital Transformation initiatives, ePlus has built a four-step Journey to Modernization Lifecycle that evaluates strategy, execution, and optimization for each application workload. Modernization may seem daunting at first, but our methodology is meant to guide you in being more efficient and streamlined after each iteration.

1. Set the Strategy and Create a Roadmap

   As with any journey, modernization starts with assessing where you are today and where you want to go and creating a roadmap to get there. This involves strategy, business outcome mapping, application analysis and dependency mapping, and modernization and operational readiness.

2. Select Platforms

   This step involves making decisions on what your cloud architecture will look like: private cloud (on-premise or hosted), public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), third-party Services, SaaS, and multi-cloud architecture. Every organization has both similar and different requirements, depending on geography and industry. Global factors, such as country laws and regulations and other geopolitical influences, also may impact your decisions.

3. Platform Design and Implementation

   This is the most critical and difficult step. It involves taking your strategy and your platform decisions, creating a well-designed, integrated platform architecture, and implementing it. The effort will address data center modernization, multi-cloud connectivity, hybrid cloud data protection, application modernization, orchestration and automation, and migration.

4. Ongoing Management and Optimization
   The last step is determining how you are going to manage your new environment. From cost optimization to operational best practices to security optimization to application modernization, this step will determine the tools, processes, and skills you will need to provide ongoing maintenance and support for your Enterprise Hybrid Cloud environment.

Enterprise Hybrid Cloud

While some organizations may be able to go all-in—migrating all workloads to the public cloud or a hosted facility—most will retain a hybrid model, where some mission-critical or highly regulated applications will remain on-premises.

The challenge is to build an architecture that works for both, delivering services to users in a cloud-like manner regardless of where the applications and infrastructure physically reside.

Enterprise Hybrid Cloud initially builds upon Data Center Modernization with a focus on software-defined infrastructure, automating common operations, and flexible data services that enable organizations to extend workloads into the public cloud and accomplish business goals faster. 

Fortunately, increased cloud adoption has fueled a surge in Data Center-as-a-Service solutions. This provides operational flexibility for how companies pay for services they use, either by capacity or workload or both.  As a result, organizations can now get a cloud-like experience—flexible and scalable compute, storage, and software—without tying up capital in underutilized resources.

ePlus Cloud & Data Center Consulting

To discuss how ePlus can help your digital transformation and move toward Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, contact us here.  Additional information can also be found our cloud and data center web pages.

Sources

¹ “The Data Center is (Almost) Dead.” Gartner. August 5, 2019:
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/the-data-center-is-almost-dead/

² Gartner Newsroom:
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-11-17-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-end-user-spending-to-grow-18-percent-in-2021