Is cloud always the answer?

Now and then it might feel convenient that an application should be transferred to cloud quickly. For those situations this blog won’t offer any help. But for occasions when the decision is not yet made and a bit more analysis is required to justify the transformation, this blog post will propose a tool. We believe that often it is wise to think about various aspects of the cloud adoption before actually perform it.

For all applications there will be a moment in their lifecycle that the question whether the application should be modernised or just to be updated slightly. The question is rather straightforward. The answer might not as there are business and technological aspects that should be considered. Having the rational answer available is not easy task. Cloud transformation should have always business need as well as it should be technologically feasible. Many times there might be an interest to make the decision rather hasty and just move forward due to the fact that it is difficult to gather the holistic view to the application. But just neglect the rational analysis because it is difficult might not always be the suitable path to follow. Success in cloud journey requires guidance from business needs as well as technical knowledge.

To address this issue companies can formalize cloud strategy. Some companies find it as an excellent choice to move forward as during the cloud strategy work the holistic understanding is gathered and guidance for the next steps is identified. Cloud strategy also provides the main reason why cloud transition is supporting the value generation and how it is connected to the organisation strategy. However, sometimes the cloud strategy work might be contemplated to be too large and premature activity. In particular when the cloud journey is not really started and knowledge gap might be considered to be too vast to overcome and it is challenging to think about structured utilisation of the cloud. Organizations might face challenges in maneuvering through the mist to find the right path on their cloud journey. There are expectations and there are risks. There are low-hanging-fruits but there might be something scary ahead that has not even have a name.

Canvas to help the cloud journey

Benefits and risks should be considered analytically before transferring application to the cloud. Inspired by Business Model Canvas we came up a canvas to address various aspects of the cloud transformation discussion.  Application Evaluation Canvas (AEC) (presented in figure 1) guides the evaluation to take into account aspects widely from the current situation to expectations of the cloud.

 

cloud transformation

Figure 1. Application Evaluation Canvas

The main expected benefit is the starting point for the any further considerations. There should be a clear business need and concrete target that justifies the cloud journey for that application. And that target enables also the work to define dedicated risks that might hinder reaching the benefits. Migration to cloud and modernisation should always have a positive impact on value proposition.

The left-hand side of the canvas

The current state of the application is addressed with the left-hand side of the Application Evaluation Canvas. The current state is evaluated through 4 perspectives;  key partners, key resources, key activities and cost related. Key Partner section advice seeking answers to questions such who are the ones that are working with the application currently. The migration and modernisation activities will impact those stakeholders inevitably. In addition to the key partners, also some of the resources might be crucial for the current application. For example in-house competences that relates to rare technical expertise. These crucial resources should be identified. Furthermore, not only competences are crucial but also lots of activities are processed every day to keep the application up-and-running. Understanding about those will help the evaluation to be more meaningful and precise. After key partners, resources, and activities have been identified, the good understanding about the current state is established but that is not enough. Cost structure must also be well known. Without knowledge of the cost related to the current state of the application the whole evaluation is not on the solid ground. Costs should be identified holistically, ideally not only those direct costs but also indirect ones.

…and the right-hand side

On the right-hand side the focus is on cloud and the expected outcome. Main questions that should be considered are relating to the selection of the hyperscaler, expected usage, increasing the awareness of the holistical change of the cloud transformation, and naturally the exit plan.

The selection of the hyperscaler might be trivial when organisation’s cloud governance guides the decision towards pre-selected cloud provider. But for example lacking of central guidance or due to the autonomous teams or application specific requirements might bring the hyperscaler selection on the table. So in any case the clear decision should be made when evaluate paths towards the main benefit.

The cloud transformation will affect the cost structure by shifting it from CAPEX to OPEX. Therefore realistic forecast about the usage is highly important. Even though the costs will follow the usage, the overall cost level will not necessary immediately decrease dramatically, at least from the beginning the migration. There will be an overlapping period of current cost structure and the cloud cost structure as CAPEX costs won’t immediately decrease but OPEX based costs will start occurring. Furthermore the elasticity of the OPEX might not be as smooth as predicted due to the contractual issues; preferring for example annual pricing plans for SAAS might be difficult to be changed during the contract period.

The cost structure is not the only thing that is changing after cloud adoption. The expected benefit will be depending on several impact factors. Those might include success in organisational change management, finding the required new competences, or application might require more than lift-and-shift -type of migration to cloud before the main expected benefit can easily be reached.

Don’t forget exit costs

In the final section of the canvas is addressing the exit costs. Before any migration the exit costs should be discussed to avoid possible surprises if the change has to be rolled back.  The exit cost might relate to vendor lock-in. Vendor lock-in itself is vague topic but it is crucial to understand that there is always a vendor lock-in. One cannot get rid of vendor lock-in with multicloud approach as instead of vendor lock-in there is multicloud-vendor lock-in. Additionally, orchestration of microservices is vendor specific even a microservice itself might be transferable. Utilising somekind of cloud agnostic abstraction layer will form a vendor lock-in to that abstraction layer provider. Cloud vendor lock-in is not the only kind of lock-in that has a cost. Utilising some rare technology will inevitable tide the solution to that third party and changing the technology might be very expensive or even impossible. Furthermore, lock-in can have also in-house flavour, especially when there is a competence that only a couple of employees’ master. So the main question is not to avoid any lock-ins as that is impossible but to identify the lock-ins and decide the type of lock-in that is feasible.

Conclusion

As a whole the Application Evaluation Canvas can help to gain a holistic understanding about the current state. Connecting expectations to the more concrete form will to support the decision-making process how the cloud adoption can be justified with business reasons.

Avoid the pitfalls: what to keep in mind for a smooth start with cloud services

Many companies are looking for ways to migrate their data centre to the cloud platform. How to avoid potential pitfalls in migrating data centres to the public cloud? How to plan your migration so that you are satisfied with the end result and achieve the set goals?

Why the public cloud?

The public cloud provides the ability to scale as needed, to use a variety of convenient SAAS (Software as a Service), PAAS (Platform as a Service) and IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service) solutions, and to pay for the service exactly as much as you use it.

 The public cloud gives a company the opportunity for a great leap in development, the opportunity to use various services of a service provider during development, as those accelerate the development and help create new functionality.

 All of this can be conveniently used without having to house a personal data centre.

Goal setting

The first and most important step is to set a goal for the enterprise. The goal cannot be general; it must be specific and, if possible, measurable, so that it would be possible to assess at the end of the migration whether the set goal has been achieved or not.

Goal setting must take the form of internal collaboration between the business side and the technical side of the company. If excluding even one party, it is very difficult to reach a satisfactory outcome.

The goals can be, for example, the following:

  • Cost savings. Do you find that running your own data centre is too expensive and operating costs are very high? Calculate the cost, how much resource the company will spend on it, and set a goal of what percentage in savings you want to achieve. However, cost savings are not recommended as the main goal. Cloud providers also aim to make a profit. Rather, look for goals in the following areas to help you work more efficiently.
  • Agility, i.e. faster development of new functionalities and the opportunity to enter new markets.
  • Introduction of new technologies (ML or Machine Learning, IOT or Internet of Things, AI or Artificial Intelligence). The cloud offers a number of already developed services that have been made very easy to integrate.
  • End of life for hardware or software. Many companies are considering migrating to the cloud at the moment when their hardware or software is about to reach its end of life.
  • Security. Data security is a very important issue and it is becoming increasingly important. Cloud providers invest heavily in security. Security is a top priority for cloud providers because an insecure service compromises customer data and thus they are reluctant to buy the service.

The main reason for migration failure is the lack of a clear goal (the goal is not measurable or not completely thought out)

Mapping the architecture

The second step should be to map the services and application architecture in use. This mapping is essential to choose the right migration strategy.

In broad strokes, applications fall into two categories: applications that are easy to migrate and applications that require a more sophisticated solution. Let’s take, for example, a situation where a large monolithic application is used, the high availability of which is ensured by a Unix cluster. An application with this type of architecture is difficult to migrate to the cloud and it may not provide the desired solution.

The situation is similar with security. Although security is very important in general, it is especially important in situations where sensitive personal data of users, credit card data, etc. must be stored and processed. Cloud platforms offer great security solutions and tips on how to run your application securely in the cloud.

Security is critical to AWS, Azure, and GCP, and their security is invested into much more than individual customers could ever do.

Secure data handling requires prior experience. Therefore, I recommend migrating applications with sensitive personal data at a later stage of the migration, where experience has been gained. It is also recommended to use the help of different partners. Solita has previous experience in managing sensitive data in the cloud and is able to ensure the future security of data as well. Partners are able to give advice and draw attention to small details that may not be evident due to lack of previous experience.

This is why it is necessary to map the architecture and to understand what types of applications are used in the companies. An accurate understanding of the application architecture will help you choose the right migration method.

Migration strategies

‘Lift and Shift’ is the easiest way, transferring an application from one environment to another without major changes to code and architecture.

Advantages of the ‘Lift and Shift’ way:

  • In terms of labour, this type of migration is the cheapest and fastest.
  • It is possible to quickly release the resource used.
  • You can quickly fulfil your business goal – to migrate to the cloud.

 Disadvantages of the ‘Lift and Shift’ way:

  • There is no opportunity to use the capabilities of the cloud, such as scalability.
  • It is difficult to achieve financial gain on infrastructure.
  • Adding new functionalities is a bit tricky.
  • Almost 75% of migrations take place again within two years. Either they go back to their data centre or they use another migration method. At first glance, it seems like a simple and fast migration strategy, but in the long run, it will not open up the cloud’s opportunities and no efficiency gains will be achieved.

‘Re-Platform’ is a way to migrate where a number of changes are made to the application that enable the use of services provided by the cloud service provider, such as using the AWS Aurora database.

Benefits:

  • It is possible to achieve long-term financial gain.
  • It can be scaled as needed.
  • You can use a service, the reliability of which is the service provider’s responsibility.

 Possible shortcomings:

  • Migration takes longer than, for example, with the ‘Lift and Shift’ method.
  • The volume of migration can increase rapidly due to the relatively large changes made to the code.

‘Re-Architect’ is the most labour- and cost-intensive way to migrate, but the most cost-effective in the long run. During the re-architecture, the application code is changed sufficiently that it can be handled smoothly in the cloud. This means that the application architecture will take advantage of the opportunities and benefits offered by the cloud

Advantages:

  • Long-term cost savings.
  • It is possible to create a highly manageable and scalable application.
  • An application based on the cloud and micro services architecture enables to add new functionality and to modify the current one.

Disadvantages:

  • It takes more time and therefore more money for the development and migration.

Start with the goal!

Successful migration starts with setting and defining a clear goal to be achieved. Once the goals have been defined and the architecture has been thoroughly mapped, it is easy to offer a suitable option from those listed above: either ‘Lift and Shift’, ‘Re-Platform’ or ‘Re-Architect’.

Each strategy has its advantages and disadvantages. To establish a clear and objective plan, it is recommended to use the help of a reliable partner with previous experience and knowledge of migrating applications to the cloud.

Cloud services

Hybrid Cloud Trends and Use Cases

Let's look at different types of cloud services and learn more about the hybrid cloud and how this cloud service model can exist at an organisation. We’ll also try to predict the future a bit and talk about what hybrid cloud trends we are expecting.

As an IT person, I dare say that today we use the cloud without even thinking about it. All kinds of data repositories, social networks, streaming services, media portals – they work thanks to cloud solutions. The cloud now plays an important role in how people interact with technology.

Cloud service providers are inventing more and more features and functionalities, bringing them to the IT market. Such innovative technologies offer even more opportunities for organisations to run a business. For example, AWS, one of the largest providers of public cloud services, announces over 100 product or service updates each year.

Cloud services

Cloud technologies are of interest to customers due to their economy, flexibility, performance and reliability.

For IT people, one of the most exciting aspects of using cloud services is the speed at which the cloud provides access to a resource or service. A few clicks at a cloud provider’s portal – and you have a server with a multi-core processor and large storage capacity at your disposal. Or a few commands on the service provider’s command line tool – and you have a powerful database ready to use.

Cloud deployment models

In terms of the cloud deployment model, we can identify three main models:

• A public cloud – The service provider has publicly available cloud applications, machines, databases, storage, and other resources. All this wealth runs on the IT infrastructure of the public cloud service provider, who manages it. The best-known players in the public cloud business are AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

In my opinion, one of the most pleasant features of a public cloud is its flexibility. We often refer to it as elasticity. An organisation can embark on its public cloud journey with low resources and low start costs, according to current requirements. 

Major public cloud players offer services globally. We can easily launch cloud resources in a geographical manner which best fits our customer market reach. 

For example, in a globally deployed public cloud environment, an organization can serve its South American customers from a South American data centre. A data centre located in one of the European countries would serve European customers. This greatly improves the latency and customer satisfaction.

There is no need to invest heavily in hardware, licensing, etc. – organisation spends money over time and only on the resources actually used.

• A private cloud – This is an infrastructure for a single organisation, managed by the organisation itself or by a service provider. The infrastructure can be located in the company’s data centre or elsewhere.

The definition of a private cloud usually includes the IT infrastructure of the organisation’s own data centre. Most of these state-of-the-art on-premise solutions are built using virtualisation software. They offer the flexibility and management capabilities of a cloud.

Here, however, we should keep in mind that the capacity of a data centre is not unlimited. At the same time, the private cloud allows an organisation to implement its own standards for data security. It also allows to follow regulations where applicable. Also, to store data in a suitable geographical area in its data centre, to achieve an ultra low latency, for example. 

As usual, everything good comes with trade-offs. Think how complex activity it might be to expand the private cloud into a new region, or even a new continent. Hardware, connectivity, staffing, etc – organisation needs to take care of all this in a new operating area. 

• A hybrid cloud – an organisation uses both its data centre IT infrastructure (or its own private cloud) and a public cloud service. Private cloud and public cloud infrastructures are separate but interconnected.

Using this combination, an organisation can store sensitive customer data in an on-premise application according to regulation in a private cloud. At the same time, it can integrate this data with corporate business analytics software that runs in a public cloud. The hybrid cloud allows us to use the strengths of both cloud deployment models.

Hybrid cloud model

When is a hybrid cloud useful?

Before we dive into the talk about hybrid cloud, I’d like to stress that we at Solita are devoted advocates of cloud-first strategy, referring to public cloud. At the same time, cloud-first does not mean cloud-only, and we recognize that there might be use-cases when running a hybrid model is justified, be it regulation reasons or very low latency requirements.

Let’s look at some examples of when and how a hybrid cloud model can benefit an organisation. 

Extra power from the cloud

Suppose that the company has not yet made its migration to public cloud. Reasons can be lack of resources or cloud competence. It is running its private cloud in a colocation data centre. The private cloud is operating at a satisfactional level while the load and resource demand remains stable. 

However, the company’s private cloud lacks extra computing resources to handle future events of demand growth. But an increased load on the IT systems is expected due to an upcoming temporary marketing campaign. As a result of the campaign, the number of visitors to the organisation’s public systems will increase significantly. How to address this concern?

The traditional on-premise way used to be getting extra resources in the form of additional hardware. It means new servers, larger storage arrays, more powerful network devices, and so on. This causes additional capital investment, but it is also important that this addition of resources may not be fast.

The organisation must deliver, install, configure the equipment – and these jobs cannot always be automated to save time. After the load on the IT systems has decreased with the end of the marketing campaign, the situation may arise that the acquired additional computing power is not used any more.

But given the capabilities of the cloud, a better solution is to get additional resources from the public cloud. Public cloud allows to do this flexibly and on-demand, as much as the situation requires. The company spends and pays for resources only as it needs them, without large monetary commitments. Let the cloud adoption start 😊

The organisation can access additional resources from the public cloud in hours or even minutes. We can order these programmatically, and in automated fashion in advance, according to the time of the marketing campaign.

When the time comes and there are many more visitors, the company will still keep the availability of its IT systems. They will continue to operate at the required level with the help of additional resources. This method of use is known as cloud bursting, i.e. resources “flow over” to another cloud environment.

This is the moment when a cloud journey begins for the organization. It is an extremely important point of time when the organization must carefully evaluate its cloud competence. It needs to consider possible pitfalls on the road to cloud adoption. 

For an organisation, it is often effective to find a good partner to assist with cloud migration. The partner with verified cloud competence will help to get onto cloud adoption rails and go further with cloud migration. My colleagues at Solita have written a great blog post about cloud migration and how to do it right.

High availability and recovery

Implementing high availability in your data centre and/or private cloud can be expensive. As a rule, high availability means that everything must be duplicated – machines, disk arrays, network equipment, power supply, etc. This can also mean double costs.

An additional requirement can be to ensure geo-redundancy of the data and have a copy in another data centre. In such case, the cost of using another data centre will be added.

A good data recovery plan still requires a geographically duplicated recovery site to minimise risk. From the recovery site, a company can quickly get its IT systems back up and running in the event of a major disaster in a major data centre. Is there a good solution to this challenge? Yes, there is.

A hybrid cloud simplifies the implementation of a high availability and recovery plan at a lower cost. As in the previous scenario described above, this is often a good starting point for an organisation’s cloud adoption. Good rule of thumb is to start small, and expand your public cloud presence in controlled steps.

A warm disaster recovery site in the public cloud allows us to use cloud resources sparingly and without capital investment. Data is replicated from the main data centre and stored in the public cloud, but bulky computing resources (servers, databases, etc.) are turned off and do not incur costs.

In an emergency case, when the main data centre is down, the resources on the warm disaster recovery site turn on quickly – either automatically or at the administrator’s command. Because data already exists on the replacement site, such switching is relatively quick and the IT systems have minimal downtime.

Once there is enough cloud competence on board, the organisation will move towards cloud-first strategy. Eventually it would switch its public cloud recovery site to be a primary site, whereas recovery site would move to an on-premise environment.

Hybrid cloud past and present

For several years, the public cloud was advertised as a one-way ticket. Many assumed that organisations would either move all their IT systems to the cloud or continue in their own data centres as they were. It was like there was no other choice, as we could read a few years ago.

As we have seen since then, this paradigm has now changed. It’s remarkable that even the big cloud players AWS and Microsoft Azure don’t rule out the need for a customer to design their IT infrastructure as a hybrid cloud.

Hybrid cloud adoption

Organisations have good reasons why they cannot always move everything to a public cloud. Reasons might include an investment in the existing IT infrastructure, some legal reasons, technical challenges, or something else.

Service providers are now rather favouring the use of a hybrid cloud deployment model. They are trying to make it as convenient as possible for the customer to adopt it. According to the “RightScale 2020 State of the Cloud” report published in 2020, hybrid cloud is actually the dominant cloud strategy for large enterprises:

Hybrid cloud is the dominant strategy

Back in 2019, only 58% of respondents preferred the hybrid cloud as their main strategy. There is a clear signal that the hybrid cloud offers the strengths of several deployment models to organisations. And companies are well aware of the benefits.

Cloud vendors vs Hybrid

How do major service providers operate on the hybrid cloud front? Microsoft Azure came out with Azure Stack – a service that is figuratively speaking a public cloud experience in the organisation’s own data centre.

Developers can write the same cloud native code. It runs in the same way both in a public Azure cloud and in a “small copy” of Azure in the enterprise’s data centre. It gives the real cloud feeling, like a modern extension to a good old house that got small for the family.

Speaking of multi-cloud strategy as mentioned in the above image, Azure Arc product by Microsoft is worth mentioning, as it is designed especially for managing multi-cloud environments and gaining consistency across multiple cloud services.

AWS advertises its hybrid cloud offering portfolio with the message that they understand that not all applications can run in the cloud – some must reside on customers premises, in their machines, or in a specific physical location.

A recent example of hybrid cloud thinking is AWS’s announcement of launching its new service ECS Anywhere. It’s a service that allows customers to run and manage their containers right on their own hardware, in any environment, while taking advantage of all the ECS capabilities that AWS offers in the “real” cloud to operate and monitor the containers. Among other things, it supports “bare” physical hardware and Raspberry Pi. 😊

As we’ve also seen just recently, the next step for Amazon to win hybrid cloud users was the launch of EKS Anywhere – this allows customers using Kubernetes to enjoy the convenience of a managed AWS EKS service while keeping their containers and data in their own environment, on their own data centre’s machines.

As we see, public cloud vendors are trying hard with their hybrid service offerings. It’s possible that after a critical threshold of hybrid services users is reached, it will create the next big wave of cloud adoption in the next few years. 

Hybrid cloud trends

The use of hybrid cloud related services mentioned above assumes that there is cloud competence in the organisation. These services integrate tightly with the public cloud. It is important to have skills to manage these correctly in a cloud-native way.

I think we will see a general trend in the near future that the hybrid cloud will remain. Multi-cloud strategy as a whole will grow even bigger. Service providers will assist customers in deploying a hybrid cloud while maintaining a “cloud native” ecosystem. So that the customer has the same approach to developing and operating their IT systems. It will not matter whether the IT system runs in a “real” cloud or on a hybrid model. 

The convergence of public, private and hybrid models will evolve, whereas public cloud will continue to lead in the cloud-first festival. Cloud competence and skills around it will become more and more important. The modern infrastructure will not be achievable anymore without leveraging the public cloud.

CxO You need to understand this about Cloud

In order to embrace full potential of modern techniques like AI/ML, IoT, Agile, DevOps, you need CLOUD to enable your IT to support Business at full scale

It’s probably useless to start making more listings of the benefits of the cloud. There has been enough of those during the past 5 years. At the same time the digital transformation has been on the table of every CEO, CIO, CDO, CMO, etc. We can all agree that we need to have a modern data warehouses, make mobile solutions, be agile, create new digital services and utilize artificial intelligence. In the Cloud, these services can be taken for granted. However, I have noticed that companies and organizations don´t necessarily understand what the utilization of cloud really means and requires from you.

In order to embrace the full potential of modern techniques like AI/ML, IoT, Agile, DevOps, you need CLOUD to enable your IT to support Business at full scale

Why the platform matters?

Usually, technology is technology and should not be mixed with strategy discussions, but I think that the cloud makes an exception, at least next x years (I’m not going to predict). When advanced digital transformation companies are telling the story where data is the new oil and other possibilities of the new business opportunities, they seem to forget to mention the platform that makes it all possible. Without the cloud, flexible and scalable modern data platforms with AI and other innovative solutions fall short. You just cannot get that speed, ease of management and the variety of services from on-prem or “private cloud” solutions.

Problem is that Senior management may lack an understanding of how big change the cloud is for their organization especially for IT, how it tightly links to digital transformation and what kind of resistance it may create.

Still today, there are a number of large companies where their own IT department does not know how to properly utilize the cloud

Change resistance and skills gap leads to shadow IT

Still today, there are a number of large companies where their own IT department does not know how to properly utilize the cloud and, at worst, they deliberately slow down cloud-related projects. This is natural, you tend to resist things that are unknown and things that put you out of your comfort zone. For these reasons, things aren´t moving at the speed that business wants.

This can create a shadow IT inside the company, where business units start to acquire cloud solutions directly so that they do not have to struggle unnecessarily with un-matching solution offering and lack of capabilities of their own IT.

The key challenge here is that when you start to develop services in an environment where you haven´t built your foundation properly, the continuity and manageability of services you build, are at risk. Lack of centralized management entails unnecessary risks as eg. unmanaged users become a huge risk.
In this way, environments in the cloud by different business units and by different partners are created with no one thinking about the whole. IT has traditionally thought about these things, but now it has been ignored. IT’s concerns and resistance against these types of projects are genuine and valid. If they don’t have the skills to build cloud services, so how would business units have? Well, they have the courage and enthusiasm to go forward but they’ve not used to handle subjects related to continuity and manageability.

This leads to, as I have written previously, into cloud service mess and uncontrolled cloud.

Going to the cloud is a big change that needs to be better addressed and lead properly.

How could this be taken into account and handled better?

Communication

Effective internal communication is needed. When the strategy outlines that we are developing new digital services and ecosystems, it must be made clear that this means deploying new cloud services. This must be repeated! The issue mentioned in the management’s monthly letter is just not enough. Many times I’ve been in situations where the customer’s personnel have been told that they’re going to take the environment into the cloud, but no one has really understood what that really means.

Leading the change

When communication is in order, you need a leader with the power to act and understanding of the cloud. If going to the cloud is not managed properly and with a sufficient mandate, it is difficult to move things forward. Care must be taken to ensure that data center processes and architectures do not fall into the cloud. In the cloud, new ways of working are needed, and addressing this may sometimes require the use of powers.

Engagement and competence development

A good leader understands that know-how does not come from scratch and everything cannot be outsourced. So at the same time when it´s important to bring in knowledgeable partners in your projects, it is also to involve your own IT from the beginning. Existing competencies should also be mapped and based on this, form learning paths to the new cloud roles. A properly motivated old data center fox can be very eager to update their skills. Old knowledge and skills do not become obsolete overnight, they are only used differently.

Motivation

Going to the cloud is a big change for your staff, not just IT. Procurement and budgeting also change, contracts are different, etc. This can give rise to fears that one’s job is in danger and one’s skills are not enough. By encouraging competence development and rewarding achievements, a positive atmosphere is created where everyone has the same goal. This is not rocket science.

With these things in mind, we can start building a modern digital services platform that supports business and agile development.

Our adaptive cloud transformation framework helps you to do this without the need for a massive transformation project; it just ensures that all the things are taken into account.

The time span, needed resources, etc. are adapted to your needs and your situation.

Contact me if you are interested to learn more

Anton Floor
Cloud Advisor
anton.floor@solita.fi