Establish a cloud strategy: the winning formula

Organizations adopt a cloud strategy for many reasons, including to make IT operations run more efficiently and to make the company more competitive. Companies want to optimize value chains. They want to do more work and do it faster, with less friction. Also, in the midst of a pandemic, it was sought that the adoption of cloud models provide support and business continuity in a situation as complex as confinement. An operating model is the model of how people, processes and technology create value for an organization.

And in this regard, a major challenge facing organizations is the need to shed their legacy operating models. Too many companies try to adopt cloud platforms without changing the way you work. They face steep learning curves, including getting comfortable with new tools, models and practices of shared responsibility and job roles. They end with a bad Habits Collection, tribal knowledge and sets of processes, procedures and tools that do not respond well to the demands of a modern ecosystem. And, in turn, they fail to leverage operational learnings across their operations, missing out on opportunities to deliver agility improvements across the organization. That is, large changes managed on a regular basis can cause tensions with negative results.

To adopt a cloud strategy, a major challenge organizations face is the need to shed their legacy operating models.

The third way: Platform “Edge-to-Cloud”: The good news is that this tension is increasingly unnecessary because there is a new way to manage data and applications that allows companies to obtain all the benefits of the cloud, regardless of where they are. A binary choice is no longer necessary: ​​cloud or the Data Center (“choosing is loosing”). There is a third option: the “HPE Edge-to-Cloud” platform. A new kind of cloud experience that combines the benefits of cloud, edge, and on-premises data centers, creating a kind of “customer-facing cloud.” Considerations that reinforce this proposal: Gravity (inertia) of the data, Control, Data security, Cost, Blocking, Operational efficiency and Refactoring.

The platform “HPE Edge-to-Cloud” incorporates intrinsic factors of the cloud experience: ease of use, the ability to scale up and down instantly, pay-per-use, and third-party management. But like traditional local data management, it also offers the option of local control, enhanced security, and high-performance computing power.

Transformation Framework (E2CAF): Organizations undertake transformation initiatives because they expect the benefits to outweigh the costs and risks. The key to success is not to eliminate risk, but to understand and manage it, and to take strategic risks where outcomes can be predicted. The “Edge to Cloud Transformation Framework” (E2CAF) is a tool that helps manage risks in transformation. It provides a comprehensive definition of a target operating model for an organization, developing eight domains of capability in which that organization would need to progress. These are: Strategy and Governance, Innovation, People, Operations, Applications, DevOps, Data and Security.

This framework of eight domains also serves to assess the maturity of an organization. Each domain is made up of a series of capability areas against which an organization’s performance is assessed. The scale used is five levels: Ad-hoc, Adapted, Enabled, Optimized and Maximized.