Cloud Economics – Leveraging Business Value Through Cloud

Today, the metric for success of cloud native services is measured by cost efficiency, business agility, and the speed of business transformation. Cloud has become more than a technology transformation driver; it is now recognized as a business transformation accelerator. While building compelling experiences on cloud through software innovation, enterprises have focused on automation agenda required for infrastructure configuration, provisioning, compliance, and change management. Cloud migration, being the first step, is followed by the process of setting up cloud operations.

As cloud offers scalable and powerful computing solutions at low costs with reliable storage options that meet the most demanding workload requirements of the modern times – cloud technologies, can be used to quickly deploy solutions around the world on any device. TCS helps enterprises navigate the digital transformation process by accelerating migrations at scale.

Below listed are various steps followed by TCS for cloudification that yield sustainable cloud value economics to enterprises as they begin to embrace cloud journey.

• Arriving at a cloud footprint potential: The important elements of the assessment include integration blueprint, LoB-wise SaaS/PaaS adoption roadmap, application propensity to cloud based on the technology, and the data residency considerations that ensure better application performance at optimal network bandwidth consumption.
• Deciding the timing of cloud adoption: Once cloudification assessment has been done, we at TCS juxtapose the assessment against the underlying infrastructure dimensions to figure out the timing of application migration to cloud. The key elements which drive the timing of current applications to move from DC to cloud are primarily based on the EOL refresh cycle of infrastructure estate and also the rigidity of current sourcing/licensing arrangements. We understand the overall value of current assets and lifespan that has guided us to make reasonable assumptions for our cloud solution.
• Robust cloud foundation: As part of our cloud foundation strategy, we believe enterprises must gain from the native automation capability of AWS and drive the right consumption mind-set by adopting good cloud usage standards like cloud charging model based on real-time Financial Operations (FinOps). One must also bear in mind that foundation evolves vertically during the course of migration and horizontally to accommodate new expectations of the business such as AIML, IoT initiatives within one or multiple hyper-scalers.
• Pragmatic migration plan from an integrated approach between apps, data, infrastructure, and security workstreams: A smart approach is to weave-in layered modernization strategy starting at OS and DB layer wherever appropriate as part of the migration journey to scale modernization initiatives down the road. Also note that success of the migration is decided not only by the applications running seamlessly on cloud, but also by decommissioning velocity of current DC workloads to minimize dual-run environments and associated overheads.
• Earn business acceptability: The key elements of business acceptability dimension include security assurance, regulatory compliance and most importantly, ease of audit readiness. This dimension is key to sustain perpetual value from cloud beyond one-time migration given the ever-evolving expectations in this space.

Cloud value economics – food for thought

Cloud was seen primarily as a means to reduce IT running costs five years ago with focus on DC exits to cloud. However, today with numerous value creation possibilities that the hyper-scalers offer, enterprises are actively looking at ground-up modernization options including review of current business processes before investing in cloud-native development. The above mentioned five dimensions of cloud value economics lend a relevant perspective to a robust start of cloud journey. Our delivery wisdom has taught us that modernization/cloud-native development goals can be catalyzed by migration first. However, one needs to think about modernization in the long-term especially in areas of cloud-native architecture decisions, multi-cloud commitments, and SaaS adoption for sustainable yet agile cloud value economics.

TCS’ cloud services help accelerate digital transformation in a fast-moving business environment. As cloud helps businesses achieve differentiation and accelerate innovation, the learning and value enablement possibilities are numerous from each cloud journey.

Author Bio

E-mail: aditya.jn@tcs.com

Aditya Jaigopal Nagaraj leads the strategy office and business operations at TCS’ AWS business unit. He has more than 20 years of experience in designing innovative business solutions for large enterprises. He specializes in building purpose-driven, cloud-based solutions across various industries and in crafting transformative large deals in IT infrastructure and Cloud. He is passionate about building energized teams, teaching students, building robotic models and curating model train collections.

To learn more, visit us here.