How Managed Cloud Services Support Digital Transformation

Innovating Digital Transformation from an Operational Standpoint.

When a company moves applications to the cloud, builds out data platforms for new work, or launches a digital transformation project to modernize the company’s IT infrastructure, to operationalize the new work, to support new products, etc., they are only unlocking the true value of said work when their teams can effectively run said new work.

By handing over some infrastructure and operational work to managed cloud services, organizations can give internal teams more time and capacity to focus on modernization, new products, and business priorities.

The Real Shift Happens After Migration

An organization can easily move applications to the cloud but still use outdated architecture and inefficient processes. The cloud is a big part of Digital Transformation but is only a part of it and can, in fact, make it harder to complete transformation if not done correctly.

When applications move to the cloud, many aspects of the application and its infrastructure may still be outdated. In some cases, the application architecture may still be outdated and not take full advantage of cloud capabilities. Inefficient processes may be in place for handling infrastructure issues, and some infrastructure settings may not be optimal for cloud-based infrastructure.

The next layer of support on top of managed cloud services helps with service monitoring, service management, and the development of cloud-native applications.

So while migrating to the cloud changes where your technology runs, modernization changes how it works for you to enable digital transformation and greater competitive advantage.

Microsoft Azure’s cloud platforms include infrastructure, data, security, and application services that companies can use during modernization programs.

Freeing IT Teams From the Work That Slows Transformation

Running a digital business means making decisions, testing out new ideas, and redesigning processes and business models. To do this, you need people. People who work on and run digital processes and businesses. Digital transformation requires people. But people can’t focus on digital processes and businesses when they are busy with routine infrastructure work.

Monitoring alerts, applying patches, investigating performance problems, and managing capacity to guarantee the required service level – such a large part of the work of IT departments is actually not very valuable.

You still need to manage cloud-based workloads, servers, and applications, but your team doesn’t need to do it all. Managed cloud providers can take on agreed sets of tasks for you and your IT team. This lets your team oversee and control all your cloud-based services.

With a small IT department or even no specific cloud experts within your company, it might take a while to get the internal team up to speed before they can move on to handle more strategic work. During this time, an experienced provider can handle routine work smoothly within the agreed scope of operation.

In summary, you can complete the hard work of transferring workloads and applications to the cloud without bogging down internal IT teams with routine work. It gives them more room for higher-value work.

Turning Cloud Infrastructure Into a Business Tool

Real cloud adoption is about more than just shifting your IT infrastructure to the cloud. Cloud infrastructure must support decisions outside the IT department.

Organizations often launch new digital services before the necessary support processes are in place. As a result, business requirements to monitor application performance, measure customer demand, track infrastructure usage, and manage operational costs are often spread across different systems.

Many organizations use their managed cloud environments to provide ongoing monitoring and, more importantly, operational visibility across both their applications and their underlying IT infrastructure. This data and these signals allow organizations to identify potential issues with respect to their application’s capacity before they occur. Organizations can also better understand performance changes, identify potential issues, and determine how their technology resources are being utilized.

They can also influence decisions about launching new products, services, and channels, as well as service delivery and technology acquisition.

So instead of just keeping servers running and managing applications in the cloud, there’s an opportunity to manage technology to support the business.

Flexibility Matters When Priorities Change

Transformation rarely follows a perfectly predictable roadmap.

Another way to look at this is that many workloads are moving to the cloud, and connections are being made between workloads across different environments. Managing a large number of workloads across different environments is not easy.

Rigid infrastructure makes these changes harder.

Cloud providers can manage cloud infrastructure, while customers can manage the environment as needed through the provider’s interface. This can be done on a per-service basis, or as needed for any given workload, with services such as managed resource groups, monitoring, performance, and more provided as needed.

It is worth noting, however, that platforms such as TierPoint Adapt Platform have been designed as managed services to help organizations like this. They can provide the necessary operational support to expand or contract as required.

In summary, more flexibility in cloud management is only useful if it actually solves an operational problem. So don’t go for the biggest words; choose a service model that fits your needs.

Security Cannot Be an Afterthought

These same workloads and applications in the cloud will create new Security risks, such as increased attack surfaces from API interfaces and cloud services, new endpoints from mobile users and virtual desktops, and increased exposure from increased use of public cloud services.

Security therefore needs to be built into your transformation efforts, rather than being an afterthought to your cloud migration efforts.

These managed services can support the following areas of control and management: access management, monitoring, patching, configuration management, and security controls. However, the organization should manage all of these services with appropriate governance and oversight.

Reference to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 to describe the Security aspects of a digital transformation initiative. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework outlines and helps manage an organization’s cybersecurity risk. In this reference, NIST views the framework as a mechanism to help an organization assess, prioritize, and communicate its cybersecurity efforts within and across an organization’s operational levels.

The risk-based approach of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 is very relevant to digital transformation. Instead of applying the same security controls to all workloads (e.g., all cloud-based), organizations should reflect each workload’s importance and exposure in their security decisions.

Keeping Complexity From Becoming the New Normal

While cloud adoption can solve many infrastructure problems, it can also create new management problems.

An organization starts with one cloud environment. Over time, this could grow, and the organization may find itself managing several cloud accounts, running multiple applications across different regions on various platforms. Without any managed services managing these environments for you, they can become hard to monitor and very fragmented, with inconsistent configurations and often a lack of clear ownership, and therefore increased operational complexity.

Repeatable processes offered by Managed Services for individual cloud environments help you manage them consistently and switch between them quickly. This doesn’t mean removing all differences between platforms. The aim is to balance each platform’s individuality with consistency across environments, so your teams can work effectively with all of them.

That becomes increasingly important as transformation programs mature.

Measure the Transformation, Not Just the Technology

There’s a big difference between moving workloads to the cloud and doing a successful digital transformation. Yes, you can complete the migration, and the transformation program can fail to deliver any business value.

Measuring outcomes that matter to run a business, such as the availability of applications, the frequency of deployments, the cost of running data centers, the time spent on routine tasks, and the time it takes to launch new services and solutions, will give a much better indication of the value of a transformation program.

The right metrics depend on the business objective.

This means that if the organization’s goal is to increase the rate of product development, then the number of deployments per time period would be a key metric. If the organization’s goal is to increase operational resilience, then metrics related to availability and recovery would be key.

Measuring outcomes matters more than measuring progress toward a technical milestone.

Making Cloud an Engine for Continuous Change

Your real work lies ahead – continue to successfully modernize applications and also keep running services and set up new services and ongoing improvements to implement successfully to keep up with the fast-paced, continuous, never-ending, constant, transformative, rapidly changing nature of today’s modern world and how it continues to be.

Managed cloud services are more than just a place to host your organization’s applications. They can also provide operational expertise, monitoring, scalability, and day-to-day support for applications and services that are transforming.

When cloud-based infrastructure or services are well managed, with clear responsibilities, adequate security measures, and measurable goals, the underlying cloud platform can support ongoing change and business modernization and digital transformation initiatives.