Senior VP, Head of Consulting & Advisory Services at Vernovis, one of the Midwest’s premier talent solutions firms.
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Organizations all over the world are in a mad rush to move to "the cloud," with an urgency only exasperated given today’s business challenges. But as I talk to analysts and travel around the country talking to CIOs and cloud leaders, most organizations seem to be struggling to get over one-third of their workloads into a hyperscale cloud.
Why is that? I believe it is primarily because of the common misperception that hyperscale = cloud.
Just like you have choices when you walk down the cereal aisle, you also have choices when it comes to your cloud providers. There are, of course, three primary hyperscale providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), and each has been designed to work at a massive global scale and architected to leverage microservices capabilities. They each have their unique strengths and weaknesses, but their primary underlying architectures are similar in the cloud-native arena, supporting high levels of variability in workloads, enabling rapid scalability and innovation, and providing unique and powerful PaaS capabilities.
These strengths work well when you are building new applications or when you are rebuilding applications as you undergo a major digital transformation. They also work when you have seasonal applications where you need the ability to rapidly scale up and down to support demand. But for the bulk of your workloads, it is like using a Ferrari to take your kids to school when a minivan might work much better.
That is what organizations who have been on this cloud journey for a while are finding out—if you choose one-size-fits-all in the cloud, the entire financial model breaks down. I liken this to a “cloud iceberg," which would look something like this:
Above The Water:
• Applications with highly variable workloads
• Net New applications
• Customer-facing applications requiring regular change
• Seasonal applications
Below The Water:
• E-Commerce applications
• Applications requiring heavy data transfer
• Core operational applications (ERP, finance, HR, etc.)
• IBM Power Systems applications
• Mainframe applications
When looking to move workloads and applications to the cloud, it's what lies beneath the surface that can really “hurt” you. That’s why I like to use an iceberg analogy. About one-third of enterprise applications and workloads work well in cloud-native environments. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s the two-thirds of ice below the waterline that should keep you up at night. These are the mission-critical and core legacy applications that would benefit from a cloud operating model but are simply not cost effective when placed in a hyperscale cloud environment.
Beyond that, there are all those steady-state, mission-critical applications like your ERP in manufacturing, policy systems in insurance or electronic medical records in healthcare or your finance or HR systems in every industry. Refactoring these applications (even if possible) could take years and add minimal value to the business. For these sorts of workloads, a hyperscale cloud is typically overkill, and an alternate cloud can be just the landing spot to meet your needs.
451 Research clearly outlines this new market segment and the value of a multi-cloud approach when targeting transformation on your cloud journey. Many of these alternate clouds are specifically architected to support these "under the waterline" workload types. For example, the Virtustream Cloud is specifically architected for SAP workloads and the Expedient Enterprise Cloud, my company's cloud software, is specifically architected for VMware-based workloads. Knowing what your workload needs are and finding the right cloud to meet those needs is critically important.
Even with that, there is that “hard ice” at the bottom of the cloud iceberg: the legacy systems like mainframes and power series. To put this into perspective, there are currently 10,000 mainframes actively being used around the world, including those being used by 71% of Fortune 500 companies. These aren't the shiny new applications but the back-end digital plumbing that is the lifeblood of organizations still leveraging this technology. These are often the last workloads standing when it comes to getting you out of your data center. There aren’t many good ways to move these workloads to the cloud yet, so a co-location partner may be the best way to get you out of your data center and deliver the highest return on your cloud journey.
What I, along with other analysts, are seeing is that improper placement of these workloads comes back to haunt you in a cloud migration. This is not the time for broad proclamations and hand waving by IT leaders. Organizations need to leverage a data-driven approach to build intelligent business cases, identifying key objectives and then clearly communicating the expected benefits of this critical initiative. Remember to view cloud adoption as a journey, not a destination.
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