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Cloud technology is a springboard for digital transformation, delivering the business agility and simplicity that are so important to today’s business. Cloud is also a powerful catalyst for improving IT and user experiences, with operating principles such as anywhere access, policy automation, and visibility.

The benefits of cloud for the business, for IT operations, and for employee experiences are clear. But what if you could take the best principles of cloud and apply them across your entire IT infrastructure?

Simpler operations belong everywhere—not just the cloud

There’s no reason that the benefits of cloud need to be limited to the cloud. With the right strategy, platforms, and solutions, organizations can bring the cloud operating model to the network and across the entire cloud and network IT stack. In fact, in a recent IDC study, 60% of CIOs stated they are already planning to modify their operating model to manage value, agility, and risk by 2026.

Transitioning to this new operating model unlocks more benefits for IT leaders, in more environments and use cases. It simplifies operations for on-premises and cloud infrastructures, cutting down the complexity and fragmentation created by disconnected tools and consoles—and the different skill sets needed to work with them.

Expanding the cloud operating model also sets the stage for better collaboration between network, development, and cloud operations. By introducing a common model and language that transcends operational silos, this approach helps reduce points of friction between organizational handoffs.  The result: teams can collaborate and work together to solve problems more smoothly. Processes become more consistent, predictable, and less prone to manual errors.

Bringing the cloud operating model to the network helps your teams execute faster and be more agile. It can automate tasks such as deploying a new distributed application for users in the home and office. For example, with a cloud-managed SD-WAN, a company can establish connectivity and security in about an hour. With a traditional siloed approach, those same steps could take NetOps, DevOps, and SecOps teams days.

Once an application is up and running, the cloud operating model can support greater visibility into cloud and data center operations, application deployment, and performance. When you have improved end-to-end visibility, you can react more quickly. Your teams can troubleshoot faster, tune performance more easily, and enjoy a more intuitive experience as they do it.

When you simplify IT, better experiences and outcomes follow

What happens when the cloud operating model is brought to the network? Organizations gain the benefits of a simplified IT approach and better user experiences. But that’s not all. It also frees IT leaders to focus, innovate, and deliver better business outcomes.

Improving the application experience

Applying the cloud operating model expands visibility, creating an end-to-end view that enables more consistent governance across the infrastructure, from the network to the internet to the cloud, to help ensure a better application experience for every user.

Powering a more agile, proactive business

Making IT more agile ripples across the whole organization. By automating manual processes, you can get out in front of business changes, deploying resources to support new applications, so you can meet changing needs for business stakeholders, faster.

Controlling costs

Expanding a common operating model helps your teams work smarter with consistent management of the deployment, optimization, and troubleshooting lifecycles, both in the cloud and on-premises.

Breaking down silos for productivity

Cloud operating principles can enable consistent governance that helps bring down the barriers between siloed cloud and network teams—and help IT move beyond fragmented operations with different policies and processes.

Applying stronger security everywhere

Cloud consistency can also enhance security. With automation and improved end-to-end visibility, you can build security into every environment and make automated security updates an integral part of all lifecycle management.

Bring the best of the cloud across your infrastructure

There’s no “one size fits all” approach to a cloud operating model. It needs to be designed and tailored to align with each organization. With the right strategy, platforms, and services, you can take a big step toward simplifying IT to deliver unified experiences and improved business agility.

Discover how.

Digital Transformation

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Technology innovation is happening at breakneck speed, creating new opportunities and threats for companies of all sizes and industries. At the same time, ever-evolving macroeconomic conditions are pressuring leaders to drive business outcomes against tighter margins.

While today’s business climate certainly feels like a test for the survival of the fittest, your goal should not be to just survive, but rather to thrive. In this new reality where a bank can go under in two weeks, and new innovations are fundamentally changing our ways of life (e.g., ChatGPT) the speed with which businesses are able to respond to changing market dynamics and customer needs is critical.

In a world where companies are defined by the digital services they can deliver, software agility IS business agility, and in turn results in better business outcomes.

Software agility translates to teams being able to quickly build and deploy applications in order to address changing customer needs, create new revenue streams, and scale to meet demand. Software agility also means that if the organization would like to leverage a new technology to innovate and remain competitive, teams can easily deliver an app that does just that.

However, as organizations rush to adopt cloud computing, Kubernetes, and open source software, they are faced with a sprawling landscape of tools and services that can be overwhelming and costly. And while it’s inspiring to behold the innovation happening around us – or as Stephen O’Grady from RedMonk called it “an embarrassment of riches” – developers can find themselves suffering from “analysis paralysis” and even worse, having to stitch their favorite tools and services together, taking time away from writing code and delivering those applications that run the business and delight the end users.  

Instead of tools serving to enhance productivity, today’s developers are caught in a tangled web of tools and services just to support their day-to-day. Additionally, this has added to the complexity of managing apps and infrastructure in a multi-cloud environment, where teams have to control costs, ensure performance, and manage consistent security policies across these diverse and distributed environments. Businesses with a multi-cloud environment also face a growing number of IT silos that can lead to inefficiencies and increased risk. And, as is increasingly common in today’s tightening labor market, a lack of skilled professionals adds yet another layer of difficulty. The complexity of today’s digital systems has multiple points of friction that need to be addressed if we are to achieve true business agility.

Organizations need a new approach – establish a common platform supported by a platform engineering function to unify application delivery and management across different apps and clouds. This will help in optimizing application development and operations, and strengthening security and compliance. What we are finding is, for developers to be successful and productive, they need: 1. A common data platform, 2. A seamless, self-service experience with minimal hand-offs and separation of concerns 3. Strong knowledge of open source technologies.

With our comprehensive Tanzu and Aria platforms, VMware has become a trusted partner to help organizations become more agile and responsive in software development. Delivering accessible, developer-friendly experiences and IT operational management is core to our DNA. With the depth and breadth of our technologies, alongside the consulting expertise of Tanzu Labs, we help organizations transform their methodologies and practices as well. We deliver near real-time insights across the application lifecycle with simplified, streamlined, and powerful solutions for developers, platform engineering and cloud operations teams to seamlessly provision, monitor, secure, and optimize apps across multiple clouds and their entire app portfolio.

We help customers across nearly every industry – from retail and healthcare to financial services and the public sector – build a culture that empowers developer productivity to enable the delivery of better, more secure software so they can meet changing market dynamics and customer expectations.

When there’s a market condition, how it impacts your business – whether positively or negatively – depends on how fast you can change, move, and adapt. At a time when organizations are pressured to perform and achieve business outcomes more efficiently than ever, now is the time to accelerate app delivery and digital transformation efforts. The best defense is an optimized and more productive offense. Change is inevitable, as we’ve learned in the last few years. So now and in the months and years ahead, it’s imperative for organizations to continue on their journeys to be future-ready for the next disruption.

To learn more, visit us here.

Software Development

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Even as cloud spend is set to grow at a CAGR of 16.9% and surpass $1.3 trillion by 2025, the transformation journey is riddled with challenges, such as security, governance, compliance, economics, and resourcing. A cloud center of excellence (CoE) in an enterprise can make a big difference in the return on cloud investments.

Cloud CoE adoption has increased from 69% in 2017 to 82% in 2021, demonstrating its role in value creation. To work effectively, CoE transformation must rest on four key pillars — innovation, advocacy, scale, and governance — that can accelerate cloud adoption throughout an enterprise.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Besides technology expertise and contextual knowledge, every successful cloud CoE revolves around these five tenets:

Being relevant: A cloud CoE must stay relevant by bringing a convergence between the long-term objectives (top-down) and immediate priorities (bottom-up), leading to a strong foundation that supports future strategy and mitigates risk and rework.

Staying connected: A cloud CoE must seek representation and involvement from across the business to improve buy-in and compliance.

Building a strong team: Various skills, ranging from cloud experts to business specialists, are required for the effective functioning of cloud CoE.

Innovating continuously: A cloud CoE must invest time and resources to identify digital capabilities to innovate and build ecosystems of the future.

Transforming culture: A cloud CoE must engage the security and risk groups within an organization to understand the hybrid landscape and ensure the identification and mitigation of risks.

Learn more about cloud-driven business agility on Microsoft Cloud with this case study from TCS.

Cloud Computing

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When businesses migrate to public cloud, they expect to enjoy greater agility, resiliency, scalability, security, and cost-efficiency. But while some organizations undergo a relatively smooth journey, others can find themselves embarked on a bumpy trek fraught with time-wasting detours and lurking money pits – and with that glowing cloud promise still beyond their reach.

Where do they go awry? Too often, impetuosity and a diminished focus on key business drivers can result in a loss of direction, reports Chris DePerro, SVP, Global Professional Services at NTT.

“When assembling the case for a move to public cloud, organizations tend to overload stakeholder expectations and lose sight of the main imperatives behind the initiative – namely, supporting business agility and cost-efficiency,” DePerro says. “When a cloud strategy team has those chief objectives nailed down, they can plan supporting considerations – such as security, resiliency and scalability – around them more effectively.”

The Multicloud Business Impact Brief by 451 Research summarizes the findings of its own Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud, Hosting & Managed Services, Budgets & Outlook 2022 survey and identifies costs as a key driver and desired outcome of cloud transformation as well as a key limiting factor in the use of some of these resources. Indeed, 39% surveyed cited concerns about controlling costs.

But cost-efficiencies from public-cloud adoption can be undermined if organizations overspend to get there. Public-cloud services can be a tremendous resource if proper care is taken to plan and optimize the environment rather than just pushing the entire estate to the cloud as is. If optimization isn’t done, clients are often left with a larger bill and fall short of their cloud aspirations.

In many instances, the problems can be traced to inexperience in – and insufficient understanding of – cloud-migration best practices, and a lack of proper planning. Too often, organizations set off with project plans that do not take account of the full gamut of challenges.

Why do organizations fast-forward cloud migration, even if it might result in headaches afterwards?

“Common missteps are not taking time to understand and remediate as many issues as possible within the existing IT estate before migration occurs,” says DePerro. “It’s crucial that the best migration approaches are selected based on solid discovery for each workload.  This determines the approach best suited to an organization’s specific applications.”

DePerro adds: “Without a thorough pre-migration assessment of its IT estate, an organization might shift its existing inefficiencies into the cloud, where they become even more of a budgetary and performance burden by bumping up cloud’s operational costs.”

The capacity to innovate and respond to changing market conditions in a rapid manner is even more vital. Cost-efficiency and expectations of agility should be integral to a properly orchestrated cloud-migration program. 

“Agility is not always well understood,” explains DePerro. “Increasingly, it’s about using the cloud to give organizations the facility and flexibility to achieve their business objectives faster, rather than necessarily having numerous added features from the onset. We are seeing more and more customers trying to modernize in an incremental nature so as not to get bogged down in overly complicated transformation. Often, expediency overrides functionality when it comes to getting apps to market fast so that value can be derived ASAP.”

This requirement plays into the increased adoption of multicloud models. The business benefits of multicloud are compelling: organizations want to develop/run their applications in the cloud environment that’s best suited to their needs: private, public, edge or hybrid.

This in turn enlarges the complexities of managing workloads across multiple platforms.

“Working with a managed cloud service provider is a proven way to mitigate those complexities,” DePerro says, “especially if its cloud reach extends across both multivarious cloud platforms and business industries, as NTT’s does. This enables us to share both technical knowledge and cross-sector insight.”

Increasing multicloud take-up demonstrates again how rapidly cloud opportunities are evolving, leaving migration roadmaps outdated.

“Ultimately, many organizations will have to go multicloud because it’s the only way they will achieve their business objectives,” DePerro believes. “For many, multicloud is the new reality. And as with any journey into uncharted territory, being accompanied by a knowledgeable guide such as NTT, that has helped organizations complete their cloud journeys, will help navigate the twists and turns ahead.”

Visit NTT’s website now to find out how to start your cloud journey with experts who understand the pitfalls and how to overcome them.

Multi Cloud

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John Hill, chief digital information officer for MSC Industrial Supply, received his Doctor of Business Administration degree in May. His dissertation research examined the question: After years of investment in project management, change management, and more recently, agile principles, why do most companies still have a stunningly high failure rate for digital initiatives? 

Hill’s conclusion was that companies need to do a better job with organizational digital agility (ODA), which is a business’s ability to create digital capabilities quickly and efficiently.

“My hypothesis was that in many companies, there are organizational behaviors that impede project and change management practices,” says Hill. “You cannot deliver anything with terrible project and change management, but excellence in those areas alone is not sufficient for developing digital capabilities.”

What is organizational digital agility?

ODA, says Hill, is made up of three components: slack, alignment, and speed.  

ODA defines “slack” as resources that you can move from one project to another without losing any value. “When you have everyone fully engaged in an operations project, but you have to pull them off that project for something more urgent, you pose risk to the first initiative,” Hill says.

With slack, CIOs do not allocate all their resources to operational issues. They allocate some to innovation, education, or continuous improvement, which they can pause to move those resources to something more urgent. “The key to slack is that moving resources off of innovation to a high-priority project poses little operational risk,” says Hill. “Those resources can then return to the innovation activity without losing productivity.”

The second component of ODA is alignment. Hill points out in his research that most companies have a governance process through which executives align on the top list of projects for the year. But if you ask the management team which project is No. 5, 6, or 7, they will likely not know. “When conflict of resources occurs among those top projects, no one knows how to resolve it, because the prioritization is not granular enough,” Hill says. “Without clear alignment, you lose efficiency when those resources move from project to project. You increase the likelihood that the squeaky wheel gets the resources.”

The last component of ODA is speed, which is becoming critically important at a time when the rate of technology change in the market is so high. 

For his research, Hill conducted a study of 132 CIOs from companies ranging from $300 million to over $10 billion in annual revenues, and he was able to demonstrate a correlation between a firm’s ODA and its creation of digital capabilities. His research further demonstrated the connection between a firm’s digital capabilities and its ability to compete in the marketplace. “The impact of ODA is pretty stunning,” he says.

Advice for CIOs looking to improve ODA

For slack, Hill suggests setting aside sprints for innovation, education, and reducing technical debt. “This way, if you need those resources to fight a fire, you are not posing a risk to the organization,” he says.

For alignment, Hill has three recommendations:

List more than just your top priorities, and be sure to create an ordinal ranking. At MSC, the executive team has taken that first step.Develop processes to understand the true capacity in the organization. Hill likes the enterprise Kanban board, so you “see who is available and who is tapped out,” he says.Create end-to-end teams and reduce the number of resources that move from project to project. “Call them squads or product teams or scrums, but you want all the resources necessary to build a new digital capability on one team,” says Hill. “An end-to-end team could be made up of business analysts, BI analysts, data engineers, developers, and QA, with a few traveling shared resources.”

Hill acknowledges that speed is the trickiest component of ODA because it can be very difficult to find the root cause of why you are not moving faster. Here, Hill suggests shifting your emphasis from old-school steering committees to a product management model and the “end-to-end teams” concept.

“At the heart of improving speed is empowering the product owners to make decisions about the backlog and execute,” he says. “Having to wait for steering committee meetings can really slow things down.”

To increase speed at MSC, Hill is working on the concept of portfolio allocation. With an ordinal ranking of investment priorities, he aims to allocate spend to the product owners in each business unit or functional area. Those product owners then prioritize that spend within their product team. “The teams are closest to understanding what new capabilities are needed in each platform,” says Hill. “They don’t need to slow down the work by asking for direction.”

How ODA impacts the CIO role

During his first five months at MSC, which distributes metalworking and other industrial products, Hill has been reducing the time it takes to review team activity. “When I spend time with the team, I just want to know about any blockers, issues, and risks and how they are being delt with,” he says. “The team should not spend time building project status presentations. I want them to be fast and use Jira, not PowerPoint. Our meetings should last 15 minutes.”

Finally, Hill suggests acknowledging that ODA does not come from changing a few processes. It is an entirely new way of working for the IT team.

“IT leaders are used to functionally and operationally managing the people that work for them,” Hill says. “Now, the person taking a squad leadership role must work across the entire organization to bring together business analysists, data scientists, developers, and operations people to ensure we are not duplicating work. At the same time, some associates who functionally report to them may be taking work instruction from another squad leader. Changing the behaviors of IT leaders is a big challenge.”

But an even greater challenge than changing behaviors in IT is getting executives to embrace the prioritization process. “When C-level executives try to squeeze in a new priority, rather than recognizing that other work needs to stop, they usually compress everything else. When you have too much work in progress, you reduce efficiency,” he says.

To Hill, ODA is a perfect example of how the CIO role is evolving away from technology expert and toward an orchestrator role. “CIOs are not the people who need to be technology experts” says Hill. “Today’s CIOs are the designers of organizations who can keep 25 balls in the air at the same time, and know how all those balls fit into the digital vision years from now.”

Change Management

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By: Amrita Shergill, Account Manager, NaaS and Ecosystem Sales

COVID-19’s disruption of traditional business models has paved the way for long overdue business operational changes. Declining revenues, along with the burden of growing fixed cost during Covid, induced lockdowns and eroded margins. Due to these tough conditions, organizations required working capital to keep the lights on.

In response to these adverse circumstances, businesses increasingly adopted technology and an asset-light model to navigate these market challenges. Network as a Service (NaaS) supports the asset-light model by using operating expenses (OPEX) in a pay-per-use manner, and transferring technology, people and processes to a vendor/partner that is a specialist in its respective field. 

NaaS allows organizations to focus on its core business and maximize profits and shareholder value. Organizations can also move from a fixed to a variable cost structure. Research from Ernst & Young LLP1shows asset-light companies have outperformed their peers on total shareholder return over the last five years.

Aruba

Drivers, Challenges and Solutions for Executing an Asset-light Strategy

In February 2021 Ernst & Young conducted an asset-light strategy webcast poll, which included responses from more than one thousand C-suite executives. Fifty six percent (56%) of respondents agreed that digitization and innovation are key drivers for considering an asset-light strategy. However, many reported that finding the right partner is the biggest challenge in executing the asset-light strategy. 

Having a world-class network is the cornerstone of any successful digital strategy, and companies are looking for a partner that can provide a complete network solution (hardware, security, software, services) to help simplify operations, optimize resources, realize network and security convergence, and improve the user experience. 

Responding to this market need, IT vendors have introduced innovative solutions with NaaS that deliver high-performance, end-to-end network solutions in a simple monthly payment model—with no upfront capital expenditure.

Today there is a heightened demand for different types of network consumption. To embrace an asset-lite strategy, companies must consider new ways of paying for and operating their networks and provide flexibility in how customers consume their services. NaaS can help rapidly deploy and manage networks in a more elastic way. 

To learn more about NaaS and how HPE GreenLake for Aruba can support business agility through an asset-lite model, go to www.arubanetworks.com/naas

References:

Ernst & Young, “How asset-light strategies and models can boost business growth,” November 2021Networking

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The shift to a digital business environment in financial services began well before the pandemic pushed it and other sectors to more rapidly embrace digital transformation. As customers have become increasingly digitally savvy, they demand that financial services firms be more responsive to their needs. Those organizations that don’t make that change risk losing their customers to those that adopted an agile, customer-centric approach to business.

The financial services sector is also subject to more rigorous regulatory requirements than some other industries. Protection of PII data is critical, as financial services firms are extremely popular targets for hackers. Even in the best of times, financial organizations were under constant threat of a cyberattack. During the pandemic, that threat multiplied exponentially.

Three-quarters (74%) of banks experienced a rise in cyber crime since the pandemic began in 2019. However, for many financial services organizations, security and agility traditionally haven’t been mutually achievable—oftentimes, one was sacrificed for the other. That won’t work in today’s digital environment, where customer experience is the top priority.

Customers today want a user experience that is seamless across devices and environments. These days, it’s not unusual for a customer to access a bank’s mobile app to check their account balance, deposit a check or chat with a representative. Customers want to be able to transfer money to anyone, anywhere; get an answer instantly regarding their loan application; and have access to their deposits right away, with no hold on their funds. They want to initiate a transaction online and have the option to finish it in the branch via a rep (either in-person or via video) who can also let the customer know about service offerings that may be beneficial to them. And they want all these things with minimal friction or delay.

Enabling these customer-centric services requires a level of agility not seen traditionally in financial services organizations. Organizations must also ensure their data is protected and compliant. SD-WAN can help financial services organizations achieve network agility and security. Its benefits are myriad and far-reaching, able to accommodate the services that enable financial services organizations to provide customers with the highest-quality experience from anywhere, on any device. Its design provides for fast, efficient movement of data on the network while ensuring security and data integrity.

An SD-WAN overlays traditional or hybrid WAN infrastructures and locates the software or hardware nodes at each location and in the cloud. Then, based on policies defined by the operator, SD-WAN steers the traffic along the best path to ensure data moves along the fastest route.

The application-aware nature of SD-WAN enables IT administrators to determine the most intelligent path for their applications and push, manage and update policies for optimal application and network performance across locations. And because a SD-WAN is centrally managed, all provisioning and changes to the network and applications are done from one location—reducing the time and resources necessary to manage the network. Additionally, all security policies can be managed centrally, enabling IT administrators to implement security updates to all devices and users on the entire network quickly and easily, to help enable compliance.

With a software-defined infrastructure, it is also easier to collect network usage information, which could help organizations better detect anomalous behavior that could point to a security breach or attack. When combined with managed security services and solutions such as next-generation firewalls and secure web gateways, SD-WAN can provide financial services organizations with an infrastructure that offers security as well as the performance necessary for providing high-quality customer experiences.

Comcast Business offers a unique set of secure network solutions to help power financial services organizations. Its portfolio of security offerings includes DDoS mitigation, managed firewall and unified threat management, all designed to complement its SD-WAN technology.

Be ready for tomorrow’s security threats with the next generation of secure networking from Comcast Business. Learn more about Comcast Business Secure Network Solutions.

SD-WAN