I think it is fair to say that cloud-first has been the hottest take on strategic execution within IT in recent years. No matter if you have played in the market for years, or if you are a newcomer, it has been seen as the right strategic choice to see cloud as the travel of direction for many applications and workloads in search of more flexibility and less operational weight.
I definitely see the hot take cooling down, which is reflected in my client dialogues, and when I look at the recent market trends. Cloud-first can serve as a vehicle to accelerate a transformation journey, but it can also turn out to be a flawed approach where companies do not reap the business benefits, they hoped for. Some have gone on a cloud shopping spree without getting the right return on investment, which has made the cloud a costly affair. Others have been so busy transitioning from their old IT environment to the cloud, that they have not used the opportunity to modernise their IT landscape at the same time. All the nooks and corners from their data centre in the form of legacy systems, creaking integrations, outdated data architecture, poor security and so on have been transferred to the cloud. Old problems are not solved my migrating; they have just moved to a newer – and sometimes more expensive – platform.
Granular assessments pave the way
For the past years, most often cloud-first has meant cloud-only. It’s time to nuance that approach by taking a step back and do an assessment of the business needs and technology requirements when you are about to modernise existing applications or build new.
Cloud-first is no longer the automatic response for driving IT value; it is better to say cloud-if…
Let us use an example of an application that is NOT fit for cloud. It can be a rather simple application that supports one of your predictable business processes with a stable demand and capacity and a limited need to radically change the functionality in a foreseeable future. You know the exact computational performance requirements of the application; you know what kind of storage and databases are needed and these parameters are not expected to change. That kind of workload could very well be more suited to run in a data centre on premise. There is no reason to move the application into the cloud, where you will potentially end up paying more for access to innovative services, flexibility, and scalability that you do not need.
Let us also use an example of an application that IS fit for cloud. All customer facing applications and digital products can take advantage of the built-in tools for AI, chatbots and similar cutting-edge technology. It could be a web shop or a customer self-service portal. To build that kind of functionality in your own data centre on premise could limit the company’s ability to react to new customer demands and market trends. On the other hand, the cloud offers access to pre-build capabilities and SaaS platforms making it easy to adjust how you serve your clients and differentiate your offering by building new digital businesses. According to our latest market research at Deloitte, digital goods and services represent an estimated 2.7% of the consumer’s total wallet making it a category in similar size as clothing (3.9%) and electronics (3.5%).
Better cloud dialogues
In both cases, companies get the best tailored and optimised solutions at the lowest cost by doing a strategic assessment of their application portfolio to ensure business and technical attributes are considered when making strategic investments in the cloud. The cloud-if formular is not a one-size-fits-all, but there are common themes to be considered such as: business alignment, resiliency requirements, regulatory requirements and data classification, application and infrastructure architecture, as well as host attributes.
My wish for the years to come is that the cloud dialogues become more nuanced. Let us stop calling out cloud as something good or bad based on the recent clickbait cloud stories and instead embrace a cloud-if mindset to make deliberate choices for our application portfolio and drive real business value.
