business
‘‘
TALKING
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Marianne Calder, VP
& MD EMEA, Puppet
A key aspect of this is the public cloud’s
ability to deploy discovery technology. By
modelling workloads to map which resources
they use, discovery technology can help track
where a business is pulling its data from.
This transparency allows organisations to
trust that they truly know which personal
data they have and how they are using it,
as well as ensuring they are maximising the
potential value of any data by using it in the
most effective way possible.
The good news is that public cloud adoption
is relatively straightforward. A useful resource
is the Gartner Cloud Adoption Framework,
which lays out a six-stage approach to cloud
deployment and management:
1. Build skills and assess applications
(again, discovery technology can be of
use here)
2. Select cloud providers and services
3. Architect cloud services and mitigate risks
4. Estimate the bill and establish governance
5. Provision and automate cloud services
6. Operate cloud environments at scale
With deployment safely underway, IT
professionals can refocus on the real
advantages of the public cloud and how it
can help them achieve their objectives. In
the first instance, as public cloud providers
expand their offerings with new services,
businesses can add additional capabilities
to help them better serve their customers
without the hassle of setting up additional
providers and integrating them into the
existing infrastructure.
44
INTELLIGENTCIO
“
THE PUBLIC
CLOUD
IS AN
UNMATCHABLE
RESOURCE
FOR HELPING
ORGANISATIONS
DELIVER ON
THE PROMISE
OF CUSTOMER-
CENTRICITY.
Public cloud DevOps
Secondly, as organisations embrace DevOps
to enable their business transformation,
their focus is on delivering targeted solutions
for specific and real problems. As the cloud
encourages an agile and scalable way of
thinking, the public cloud becomes the ideal
conduit for taking a DevOps initiative and
deploying it at scale.
As public cloud providers deploy IaaS
and PaaS offerings, organisations face
less burdens in terms of the operations
of running software. This frees up more
capacity for software delivery rather than
management, as organisations pivot to look
on the future of the business, rather than
firefighting its current systems.
At the same time, the move to the
public cloud is offering organisations
an opportunity to rethink their software
delivery strategy, especially when it
comes to step five in the Gartner process;
automation. Cloud technology helps align
the development and operations teams with
a range of services to aid in the automation
of this, such as APIs for provisioning
and managing resources. This enables
organisations to deliver applications quickly,
at a lower cost and with fewer roadblocks
along the way due to delivery or operation
bottlenecks. As part of a hybrid cloud
structure, the public cloud is an unmatchable
resource for helping organisations deliver
on the promise of customer-centricity while
avoiding many of the challenges that often
crop up along the DevOps lifecycle.
No doubt, this is part of the reason that
some of those 50% of Forrester’s enterprise
respondents have adopted at least some
public cloud platform. However, that leaves a
significant number of businesses as yet not
experiencing the advantages, who still stand
to gain from the benefits of public cloud
infrastructure. By revisiting assumptions
about the cloud and how they internally
deliver software, businesses stand to benefit
from cost-efficient, agile, scalable cloud
services, which they can both trust and
use to deliver the solutions their customers
deserve, whatever these may be. n
www.intelligentcio.com