How businesses can choose the right cloud solution

There’s no one size fits all when it comes to hav­ing the right enter­prise cloud solu­tion. Whether it’s on-premis­es, hybrid cloud or cloud first, it needs to be guid­ed by the over­all IT strat­e­gy, organ­i­sa­tion­al readi­ness and avail­abil­i­ty of solu­tions.

Managing the legacy challenge of on-premises set-ups

When mis­sion-crit­i­cal appli­ca­tions still run on old­er plat­forms, it can be a chal­lenge over­haul­ing these sys­tems. Organ­i­sa­tions face the task of build­ing in-house skillsets while keep­ing bud­gets in check and ensur­ing there are no breaks in up-time across the organ­i­sa­tion.

While the Roy­al Nation­al The­atre (NT) might have gone dark dur­ing lock­down, behind the scenes it has been under­go­ing a trans­for­ma­tion, mod­ernising and migrat­ing many of its sys­tems to the cloud for some years now.

Yet the NT has found there isn’t always a suit­able cloud-based alter­na­tive for some of its appli­ca­tions, like its finance sys­tem. “It’s still a tra­di­tion­al sys­tem that needs to run in a cer­tain way,” says Nicholas Tri­antafyl­lou, direc­tor of IT at the Nation­al The­atre.

In years to come, Tri­antafyl­lou expects it will be migrat­ed to the cloud. “It’s just not eco­nom­i­cal­ly viable to do it,” he says. “Right now we still have some lega­cy sys­tems run­ning in our serv­er farm in-house and that’s the best way of run­ning them.”

It illus­trates how the start­ing point for mov­ing appli­ca­tions to the cloud needs to be a mea­sur­able ben­e­fit at the end of it. “Under­stand­ing what already exists is the oth­er piece of the puz­zle,” says Simon Rat­cliffe, prin­ci­pal con­sul­tant at Ensono.

Any deci­sion about mak­ing the move to the cloud isn’t just because you can. “Hav­ing a thor­ough and detailed under­stand­ing of the infra­struc­ture, under­stand­ing the needs and aspi­ra­tions of the appli­ca­tion own­ers, deter­min­ing a roadmap for the var­i­ous ser­vices and iden­ti­fy­ing soft­ware-as-a-ser­vice (SaaS), plat­form-as-a-ser­vice and infra­struc­ture-as-a-ser­vice options are all crit­i­cal if a migra­tion to cloud is to work,” says Rat­cliffe. 

Accept­ing that not every­thing will work well in the cloud is per­haps the most dif­fi­cult deci­sion. “Hav­ing some on-premise hard­ware is not fail­ure; it is prag­ma­tism,” he says.

Rat­cliffe encoun­ters lega­cy tech­nol­o­gy that has evolved over many years and has become a com­plex mesh of inter­con­nect­ed ser­vices that are not ful­ly under­stood or doc­u­ment­ed. “When you have answered the two core ques­tions – what do you have and what is the ben­e­fit of mov­ing it to the cloud? – then you can begin the process,” he says.

Working towards a cohesive hybrid cloud set-up

A hybrid cloud strat­e­gy is the most com­mon, with 87 pe rcent of organ­i­sa­tions com­bin­ing vir­tu­al and on-premis­es, accord­ing to the Flex­era 2020 State of the Cloud report. “They can strike their own bal­ance between local and off-site,” says Dyna­trace region­al vice pres­i­dent, UK and Ire­land, Abdi Essa.

How­ev­er, com­bin­ing both on-premis­es and cloud appli­ca­tions means man­ag­ing the inter­op­er­abil­i­ty between sys­tems where a glitch in one part impacts anoth­er. “The rise of the hybrid mul­ti-cloud mod­el also means apps are now hyper­con­nect­ed, with depen­den­cies across the IT infra­struc­ture,” says Essa.

The NT is run­ning a hybrid set-up with email and busi­ness appli­ca­tions all now in the cloud. Its newest stream­ing ser­vice, a much-need­ed the­atri­cal life­line to many dur­ing lock­down, could not exist with­out being vir­tu­al. Its tick­et­ing plat­form has evolved to become a SaaS cloud appli­ca­tion and its pay­roll and human resources sys­tems are next on the migrat­ed list.

With pay­roll and HR, there was no ques­tion these would be migrat­ed to the cloud and not remain in-house. “They are more expen­sive to run that way and a lot less reli­able. I don’t need com­plex teams to look after them and I don’t have the same wor­ries about the secu­ri­ty of that infra­struc­ture,” says Tri­antafyl­lou.

In addi­tion to cost and labour sav­ings in hav­ing scal­able, man­aged soft­ware ser­vices, the appli­ca­tion is con­stant­ly evolv­ing as needs and tech­nol­o­gy devel­ops. “And it’s a lot more user friend­ly this way,” he adds.  

When to take the pure cloud approach

While hav­ing a pure cloud set-up might be the end-goal for many organ­i­sa­tions, they face plen­ty of chal­lenges in secur­ing remote access, redun­dan­cy pro­vi­sion and for­ward plan­ning. “It’s a strat­e­gy that’s only worth adopt­ing if it’s appro­pri­ate to the busi­ness,” says Tri­antafyl­lou.

At the NT it’s an ongo­ing project as it looks for solu­tions to com­pli­cat­ed tasks like sched­ul­ing shows and man­ag­ing tick­et­ing at scale. As a 20-year indus­try vet­er­an, Tri­antafyl­lou has seen how enter­prise tech­nol­o­gy has become a com­plex, mis­sion-crit­i­cal func­tion in organ­i­sa­tions and trans­form­ing this into the cloud requires a com­pre­hen­sive, well-devel­oped plan.

His advice is to be prag­mat­ic about the best approach to a pure cloud strat­e­gy. “If your core busi­ness sys­tems have a cred­i­ble cloud alter­na­tive, it’s OK, but if your core sys­tem is still on-premise and is still work­ing, then focus on that, rather than try­ing to do some­thing in the cloud with­out doing the research,” he says.

Tri­antafyl­lou says cloud requires an under­stand­ing of busi­ness needs, require­ments of end-users and what you’re being promised by ven­dors. “And look at it over a three-to-five-year times­pan,” he says.

While cloud uptake has been spurred on by the pan­dem­ic, achiev­ing pure cloud may look dif­fer­ent in the future. Some say a par­a­digm shift is need­ed to redraw the divi­sion between cloud and on-premis­es. “It’s a change in think­ing towards tech­nol­o­gy as a com­pos­able sys­tem with ele­ments that can be assem­bled to suit user needs,” says Ensono’s Rat­cliffe.

“We need to decou­ple the devices from their loca­tion and exam­ine things in terms of ser­vices and run the ser­vice on the most rel­e­vant plat­form,” he says.