Leading cloud provider spotlight

How Microsoft is Accelerating Enterprise Cloud Adoption

Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Microsoft

“There is enormous growth across our cloud products. This includes Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365. Azure has nearly doubled every year and Dynamics 365 revenue has grown greater than 60% since we began disclosing it in the third quarter of fiscal year 2017.”

Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Microsoft

Microsoft came to the cloud through scaling its search engine. Bing was meant to compete with Google Search and required a scalable infrastructure on which to build. Satya Nadella, now Microsoft’s CEO, launched Bing in 2009. In his book Hit Refresh, Nadella says Bing helped jump-start Microsoft’s journey to the cloud. When he took over the Servers and Tools Business (STB) at Microsoft he sensed the cloud would be, in his words, “the biggest transformation of Microsoft in a generation.”

Scott Guthrie shares Microsoft’s journey to the cloud, in addition to having one of the fastest growing SaaS solutions on the planet, Office 365, which is driving cloud adoption in the enterprise.

In the words of Scott Guthrie:

Microsoft started its cloud journey nearly 15 years ago, when Ray Ozzie was one of the key people advocating for the cloud. At that time, we had two teams driving our cloud journey: The Office team and our Business Productivity Online Standard (BPOS) initiative.

Things really accelerated around 2010 and in the last eight years we have brought together the Microsoft Cloud, which includes platforms and services such as Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365. Today, we’re thinking about the migration to the cloud in terms of productivity, and how the overall technology needs of SaaS, PaaS, and infrastructure bind together to deliver business solutions.

Like many other enterprises whose legacy extends far beyond the cloud era, cloud transformation is a journey that we’re still on, and one we hope to continue indefinitely. Thankfully, it’s one with which we’re seeing tremendous customer success, which leads to success from a business perspective as well.

Classic dilemma

A decade ago, if you asked whether customers would rather have control or technology transition, they would choose control. This is a classic enterprise dilemma, but I would say a transition is too important. One of the problems leaders of enterprise companies historically have is not asking for transition like from command line to GUI. The future is going to happen, whether they are convinced or not, and in that case, you must act even though your best customers are saying they’re not sure that’s what they want.

If you don’t transition, by the time customer demand develops, it’s too late. Sometimes, if you act incorrectly, they never come—and in that case, you will also go out of business. Technology is a tricky thing; it’s not just cloud specific. For all technology transitions, timing is difficult. Companies have to have the fortitude to move even before there is a strong customer demand. In our case, we made the call in 2010 to transition in earnest to the cloud. We leaned into the cloud before there even was customer signal or demand. That meant that when the market really started shifting a couple of years ago we had already built out the infrastructure, data centers, and productivity software in the cloud-based environment. We were ready to ride that wave.

“If you don’t transition, by the time customer demand develops, it’s too late.“

We’ve worked to secure a strong position in the market in terms of both having the enterprise credibility, but more importantly, having the enterprise credibility in the cloud space. We have a cloud portfolio that isn’t just on the shelf and ready, but is integrated well. This is not a space where we are just doing lots of acquisitions, which leads to a very disjointed product set. While we do acquisitions, a lot of the cloud infrastructure and software that we have has been built up more organically and composes very well as a result. It is integrated in ways that provide differentiation that ultimately enables customers to be successful.

At Microsoft, we eat our own dog food

We are one of the biggest enterprise consumers of the cloud. Some of our customers have 400,000 employees that are using us, while we only have 130,000 employees. So, there are probably bigger companies now that use the cloud just because they are bigger in terms of employees. About 90% of our IT systems now run in Azure and in Office 365 and Dynamics 365. We drive a tremendous amount of consumption and with the savings we’ve been able to redeploy resources to other strategic investments.

We have always had this philosophy at Microsoft called “eat our own dog food,” which is: how do we run our own business on the software that we sell to end customers? Our email is all hosted in Office 365. Our SharePoint sites are in Office 365. Our SAP systems now run inside Azure. We do quarter end close in the cloud. We have one of the largest ERP backends in the world. All these complicated components run inside Azure, within our infrastructure. This includes our identity systems, management security systems, build systems, and dev-tech systems.

In addition, since we “eat our own dog food,” we harden our systems every time we talk to a customer. For example, if we are walking a customer through SAP migration, we are simultaneously walking through our own SAP migration. We can share our own experiences with migration, and the customers are therefore able to understand all the details in a large-scale infrastructure migration, from the perspective of our own IT team.

Our cloud is growing fast

There is enormous growth across our cloud products. This includes Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365. Azure has nearly doubled every year and Dynamics 365 revenue has grown greater than 60% since we began disclosing it in the third quarter of fiscal year 2017. The combination of our products helps employees be more productive, connect with customers, run their operations, and use data intelligence better than ever before.

I think one of the reasons why our SaaS software has grown so fast is that, historically, deploying those types of large solutions on premises took time. Previously it would have taken organizations years of planning to upgrade SharePoint or a new search engine. Now, it’s quick and easy.

Constantly making improvements

One of the biggest advantages with the cloud is the constant ability to make improvements.

It takes so much less time to safely bring value to customers at a much more rapid cadence. Even small changes can compound very quickly, and we are able to get them into the customer’s hands. This lets them take advantage of focusing on innovation investments.

Sometimes those aren’t massive changes, but the nice thing is that if you roll out features every month or every week, small features compound very quickly. Our ability to get those into customers’ hands for them to actually be taking advantage of it allows us to take the telemetry and signal to understand what’s working and what are people actually using.

Better aligning our field teams to support customers

In the last couple of years, we chose to realign our sales teams to industry verticals in order to understand our customer’s business better. Our teams now only handle retail or they only handle banking or they only handle pharmaceuticals. Then, we focused our teams around consumption instead of license sales. We wanted to help our enterprise customers adopt and consume and use cloud services so we changed the incentive models.

We have customer success managers as well as cloud solution architects that can spend time with an enterprise to help them understand, get trained better, and to be more successful.

“We’re partnering with Zscaler to provide network as a service options that integrate with Azure and with Office 365 and the Microsoft Cloud more broadly.”

We’ve tried to be very flexible around large customers who often have unique security needs or unique certification or indemnification or audit requirements. So we’ve also put together programs that can help with all of those. At the end of the day, we try to take the journey to the cloud through a technology approach, a knowledge approach, and an overall business approach. How do we really optimize that to enable our customers to be successful?

Automation improves security

The security benefits of moving to the cloud is perhaps one of the clearest for customers. Through the power of the cloud, Microsoft customers benefit from real-time detections and automations that are powered by the trillions of signals coming through the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph. Through the insights and real-time data process and the power of the cloud can we protect customers in seconds when we see an attack.

The automation and homogeneous nature of the cloud also empowers customers to streamline their environments versus traditional on-premise data centers fraught with different networking gear, different servers, different operating systems, different firmware, and different patching levels—all contributing to exponentially more maintenance and complexity. The nice thing about having a cloud-based system or a cloud infrastructure provider or a SaaS provider is it drives customers toward automation that helps them scale better. Manual processes that are slower and plagued by the potential for human error are simply not an option in the cloud. On top of all of that, at Microsoft, we can and do invest more in the security of our cloud infrastructure than our customers could do on their own. In this way, our customers can leverage our investments to their benefit. Finally, security is constantly changing. Hackers continue to get more sophisticated and the defenders must constantly work to keep up or get ahead of them.

If you think about the investment that we’re making, there’s a core set of services and solutions that we’re building. Take, for example, with Azure Active Directory, we’re providing identity as a service as part of Microsoft Cloud. On the networking side, we provide to our telco partners what we call Express Route, which enables direct network pipes between their facilities and ours. We’re partnering with Zscaler to provide network as a service options that integrate with Azure and with Office 365 and the Microsoft Cloud more broadly.

Integrated offerings: Identity, Network, SaaS, and PaaS

I encourage CIOs to make the move to SaaS wherever possible. One of the benefits of SaaS is you constantly get innovations and updates and improvements. From a long-term ROI perspective, a SaaS solution that’s always kept up to date, continuously improved, and which someone else can do the backup, the operations, and all the work-around, in the long run delivers much higher return on investment. That’s partly why, when you look at Microsoft Cloud portfolio, all of those are delivered via SaaS.

Our goal with the Microsoft Cloud is to do both SaaS and infrastructure as a service, but more importantly, integrate the two. For instance, if you’re doing custom data analytics you may have your users use a business intelligence SaaS solution like Power BI. You could then take data from your Office 365 systems and put it into a managed data warehouse on Azure. That in turn is delivered as a PaaS service, which uses custom AI and a custom set of platform services to make it richer. In that case, you have the benefits of both worlds, which is you’re still heavily SaaS on a whole bunch of different dimensions, but you always have that flexibility to spin up a VM or to use a PaaS service to do something custom.

Data privacy, data residency, and GDPR compliance is a priority

We’ve done a couple things to help our enterprise customers with data privacy and compliance. We’re committed to making sure our products and services are GDPR compliant and have made significant investments to redesign our systems and processes to meet its requirements at scale. We provide our customers with robust tools, backed up by contractual commitments, to help them with their compliance. Since this is a new regulation and we expect interpretations will change over time, we will constantly evaluate our products, services, and data uses as understanding of GDPR evolves.

GDPR has accelerated cloud migration in some cases as organizations realized it would simply be more efficient and less expensive to host their data in the Microsoft cloud where we can help them protect their customers’ data and maintain GDPR compliance. We’ve been very clear about data residency and data sovereignty and guaranteeing when you move data into a Microsoft Cloud region, that data is stored in that region. You have control. From a contract perspective and from a legal perspective we guarantee your data residency and that when we move your data across borders it is done in compliance with applicable laws, and we are willing to put that in writing. That’s been critical for European customers as well as customers elsewhere around the world in terms of having the confidence that they can actually trust their businesses with us.

Hybrid Cloud

We believe in hybrid and have approached it as an optimized state for a customer. The easier you can make it for people to link to the systems they already have and get value on day one, the faster they’ll be successful and frankly the more they’ll want to work with you. Hybrid is not just about making existing applications work. Think about IoT and how a manufacturer or someone who operates oil drilling platforms may want to take advantage of the cloud but cannot risk losing connectivity. We help them do compute locally or on the edge to provide that uptime while they may still use the cloud for data analytics or backup.

Hybrid solutions are not just for the past and for systems that are already built. It is also going to be the design footprint for new applications.

Artificial intelligence leverages data to run your business effectively

In many ways data is going to be the new digital currency. Every business is looking to find ways that they can use AI and data more effectively to transform their operations. And so we’re on a path to build data and AI capabilities that can be used horizontally but also looking at how can I take my data inside Dynamics, my data inside Office, that’s my data as an enterprise, and how can I actually use the AI and data services inside Azure to reason over it and run my business more effectively?

Have a trusted partner

One of the most important things is to have a trusted partner that you can work with to go down the cloud path. There will always be more that you can do if you’re successful in your cloud journey, so having a trusted partner that can guide you along that path is essential.

The key is to just get started. Five years ago, cloud was still relatively new for a lot of enterprises, but we’re now entering an adoption phase where the majority of new systems are now cloud based. Cloud has reached the mainstream and moving down that path is the right approach.

Leading cloud provider spotlight

Amazon’s Cloud Journey

Stephen Orban, General Manager, Amazon Web Services

“When customers are thinking about where they want to move their mission-critical and production IT workloads, they should consider which platform is going to have the most experience, and the best practices, to help them do that.”

Stephen Orban, General Manager, Amazon Web Service

Amazon Web Services (AWS) gets credit for being early to the game. Stephen Orban, General Manager at AWS, writing in his book Ahead in the Cloud states, “I genuinely believe that cloud computing is the single most meaningful technology advancement in my lifetime.” Stephen tells the story of Amazon’s cloud transformation and how it scaled to meet unexpected demand.

In the words of Stephen Orban:

The software that Amazon used to run its retail website was massive and monolithic. Its size made it hard for the company to move as quickly as it wanted and to develop the new features it needed. Our teams began to trip over each other and, if somebody made a change and it broke the build, everybody else who had a change backed up behind it was delayed as well.

Amazon made a deliberate move across the organization to transition into what we all know now as a service-oriented architecture (SOA). We broke up the software that ran retail into hundreds—and now even thousands—of services that all communicate with each other in a loosely coupled way via hardened APIs.

That idea also changed the way the engineering teams were organized. We call it a “two-pizza team” size, meaning that a team should be no larger than would consume two pizzas at one sitting. In this system, all the folks who were required to own and operate a service existed in one team, and they communicated with all the other teams by the APIs they published for the services.

That allowed us to move a lot quicker, but pretty soon we realized that a lot of these two-pizza teams were still spending a disproportionate amount of time managing the operating system, the databases, the storage, and the infrastructure that they were using.

So the founders of AWS, Andy Jassy and others, thought, “If Amazon is having this issue—even though we’re really good at running a world-class data center and infrastructure—other companies must be having this problem, too.” We saw that we could develop some services that we could use ourselves to make our teams faster, and that would make developers all over the world faster, as well.

That was the premise behind how AWS came to be. And what started off as a very small handful of simple storage, compute, and database options back in 2006 has become a platform offering more than 125 services that range from compute, storage databases, and networking security, all the way up to DevOps, mobile tools, artificial intelligence, and machine-learning services. We also built a world-class team of customer support and account managers to help customers use the services and platforms so that they, too, can free more of their resources to focus on things that matter most to their customers.

Three factors that have contributed to AWS’ growth

Jeff Bezos, our founder, would say that there are at least three things attributable to the company’s growth. The first is that we’re customer obsessed. If you translate that to AWS, 90% of our roadmap and the features and services that we’ve built over the last 12 years have been directly influenced by the things our customers have asked of us. It was our customers who requested a set of services that would make it easier to develop mobile apps. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are other examples. Those things are hard to build infrastructure for; things that we could do and provide as a service, such as SageMaker.

The second factor is that we like to invent new things. I think it’s safe to say that AWS is largely known as the inventor of public cloud computing and other services.

And then, the third thing is that we are oriented for the long term. One of the things that Jeff says is that we’re willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. I think in 2006 when Amazon first launched a simple storage service, there were a lot of people who didn’t understand it and thought maybe Amazon should stick to selling books. We continued to take a long-term view and believed that if we kept listening to customers and inventing features on their behalf, this could turn into something. Nobody had the audacity to predict it would become as big as it became.

The importance of resiliency

We build reliability, operational excellence, and security into our services from the very beginning. It’s not a situation where we develop some feature or service and then, just before we’re about to release it, we try to figure out how to make it reliable, durable, secure. We have a team of engineers across the business who think very deeply about these things throughout the process of designing our services.

As I mentioned, we listen to our customers and continue to add new features. So, as customers tell us that they need better reliability in one particular area or a new feature, we listen and try to follow very quickly with features that will meet those needs.

Another thing we think about is that we operate our services on a global scale with many, many different regions all over the world. Within each region, there are several availability zones, and within each availability zone, there are several data centers. We design our services across that global infrastructure so that we can build fault tolerance and redundancy into them. And then, of course, the service level agreements (SLAs) that we advertise on our services—we actually meet them.

We continue to scale to meet customer needs

At the moment, we have 55 availability zones inside 18 geographic regions covering the world. We’ve announced 12 more availability zones for four more regions in Bahrain, Hong Kong, Sweden, and another region in the U.S. for our government customers. It’s called GovCloud, and it’s used by millions of customers every single day.

Enterprise support fuels our customers’ success

We have large sets of account teams that consist of account managers and solutions architects. The solutions architects are really the engineers who have a broad view of how our customers are using the platform, and they help them design, implement, and operate the things they’re building on AWS.

We also have a large and fast-growing professional services team that consults on larger-scale migrations or digital transformation projects. To help customers on a longer-term basis, we have teams of support engineers and technical account managers with in-depth knowledge of how systems were designed and how they operate on our platform. As customers ramp up, these teams help customers optimize their workloads.

We’ve also developed a number of programs over the years that are designed to help customers achieve a particular business outcome. The best example I would give is a program that I built with my former team. Starting back in November of 2014, we created the migration acceleration program or MAP. The idea behind MAP was to serve those customers who were saying: Okay, I get it. I’m doing all my new workloads on the cloud, but I have a lot of technical debt that I have accrued over the course of the last 10 or 20 or 50 years. I’ve got a number of data centers all over the world and I want to get out of these data centers, and I want to retire a lot of this technical debt so that I can focus more on doing the innovative things that my customers and my business really need.

We built MAP to pull together all of the best practices around large-scale migrations to the cloud—those that involve thousands of applications at a time or dozens of data centers at a time. The best practices include those from our partner ecosystems, from our professional services teams, from our solutions architects, and from our customers themselves—all places where we can help a customer assess their portfolio, understand what’s in it and all the dependencies. We have to know that this application talks to that application or database. Then, we build a business case so that the customer understands the financial implications of what a large-scale move to the cloud might mean. In short: connect the dots, then build a plan in which they can execute a really large migration.

A common theme we are seeing is customers moving 75% of their application portfolio to the cloud over the course of the next three years in an effort to save some tens of millions of dollars. They expect to increase developer productivity by anywhere between 30% and 70%.

“A common theme we are seeing is customers moving 75% of their application portfolio to the cloud.”

These savings reflect what I accomplished when I was at Dow Jones, right before I joined Amazon. Our business case was across News Corp. We moved 75 percent of our infrastructure to the cloud over about a three-year period for a savings of $100 million a year. We were then able to devote that savings back into things that mattered to our business.

Building in privacy and GDPR

We look to build the necessary compliance framework into all of our services. We advertise which services support which compliance framework—GDPR or PCI or HIPAA or whatever the compliance framework may be. Through our various account teams, we also help customers to architect and build their applications so that they remain compliant with whatever security, regulatory, or privacy requirements that customer has.

In our business, we have a shared responsibility model. Where that line of responsibility is drawn depends on the service, so we’re responsible for the security and the privacy of everything up and to a particular point. For example, for IaaS, we manage the facility, the actual physical instance, and the hypervisor, and then the customers decide which operating system they want to deploy and which software they want to put on top of that to run their application. So, they’re responsible for everything from that layer above and we’re responsible for everything below.

Picking a cloud service provider

If you believe as we do that a lot of that IT infrastructure over the course of the next decade is going to move to the cloud, it’s not surprising that many of the large, traditional enterprise IT vendors are trying to build a replica of what AWS has built over the course of the last 12 years. There really is no compression algorithm for experience. Every day, we have more customers using more services on our platform, giving us more feedback, helping us see more ways where we can become operationally excellent and help them save money. While it may not be surprising that everybody’s trying to build a replica, it is surprising how much of a head start they gave us.

When customers are thinking about where they want to move their mission-critical and production IT workloads, they should consider which platform is going to have the most experience, and the best practices, to help them do that.

Significant cost savings

We have yet to find a case where we couldn’t save a customer money. I would say in lift-and-shift migration scenarios, where you’re not substantially changing anything about the application, the savings can range anywhere from 25 to 40%. And when you start to think about a larger-scale architecture, where you move to microservices or serverless architectures—where you’re only provisioning the resources that you need when you need them as opposed to over-provisioning servers like you would have had to do in a data center—the savings can be much more substantial than that. I’ve seen customers shave off 80% by moving to a serverless architecture.

One or many cloud service providers?

It’s definitely not winner take all. There will continue to be multiple cloud providers, but it’s a capital-intensive business, and I don’t think that there will be dozens. I think there’s going to be a small number. In my view—10 years from now, let’s say—it’s pretty hard to imagine that many companies will be running anything like the data center footprints they have today.

Leading cloud provider spotlight

How Google is Building a Massively Scalable Cloud

Tariq Shaukat, President, Partner and Industry Platforms, Google Cloud

“Cloud, which originally started as a convenient way to get access to relatively elastic computing infrastructure, has really become a core engine of business growth and business transformation in many ways. It is not just a CIO and CTO conversation, but a CEO, board, and a line-of-business conversation.”

Tariq Shaukat, President, Partner and Industry Platforms, Google Cloud

Google too had built its own infrastructure to handle the vast loads of compute and data processing for its search engine, YouTube, and Gmail. It entered the cloud service business by introducing applications rather than raw storage or compute.

Tariq highlights how Google leveraged its internal treasure trove of state-of-the-art technology and externalized it in its journey to the cloud.

In the words of Tariq Shaukat:

I am the President of Partner and Industry Platforms at Google Cloud, with responsibility for three main areas within the cloud organization here. One of those main areas is our strategic partnerships with the tech ecosystem; like those service providers who work with us on the cloud.

Google has always operated in a cloud-like environment. In fact, if you look at many of the technologies that are now foundational in the cloud, whether that is MapReduce or data analytics for data management purposes, or Kubernetes for container management purposes—the list goes on—these are all technologies that were developed and deployed inside of Google for the operations of Google.

We have seven different global applications that have over a billion users each. These require very high throughput and very low latency. We truly have been architecting in a cloud-oriented way since the very early days of the company. It was, therefore, logical to move into the cloud platform space, and into the G Suite cloud-based software space, as an extension of what we were already doing.

We already had the state-of-the-art technology being used internally at Google. What we had to do was externalize that. From a product standpoint, we needed to make it accessible and usable by companies that are not Google, and then we needed to build a go-to-market capability to acquire customers. That really was the journey. It started from a technology standpoint and thinking about the capabilities needed to run Google Search, Google Maps, YouTube, etc., and then extending that to our customers.

I think, like many things at Google, there’s a lot of innovation that happens across the whole company versus in a top-down manner. A lot of things start as the famous “20% project.” Every engineer is encouraged to spend 20% of his or her time on projects outside of the engineer's regular scope. Our evolution to G Suite started with the consumer version of the apps that we had—Gmail, Docs, Slides, and Sheets. It was a set of grassroots initiatives and kept with the mission of Google to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. From that original heritage, it eventually grew into the small business realm and then enterprise world.

Within Google, we have different pieces that make up the cloud. There’s G Suite, a highly secure and available cloud-native set of applications. Several large, traditional companies use this platform, including Airbus, Colgate-Palmolive, and Verizon. In addition, over four million smaller paying businesses use G Suite. And then there is Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This is a collection of dozens of different product offerings, including infrastructure service, compute network storage, data analytics, and machine learning.

Google has a large developer community that is mostly self-service: they come on and consume as they need, and stop consuming when they need to stop. That is how Snapchat, as an example, got started on GCP, and it’s an important part of our business today.

Cloud, which originally started as a convenient way to get access to relatively elastic computing infrastructure, has really become a core engine of business growth and business transformation in many ways. It is not just a CIO and CTO conversation, but a CEO, board, and a line-of-business conversation.

When you’re dealing in any enterprise and certainly any business context, security is critically important. Our network is a fundamental advantage—that low latency and performance we get operating inside of GCP—because we own so much of the fiber ourselves.

Selecting a cloud service provider

We always advise customers to use a strategic vendor. Besides the cloud vendor you choose, more important is how you choose to construct the architecture. You can go down the path of architecting in a way that’s proprietary to one of the clouds that you would choose. Or you could go down the path of architecting so that you can run in multiple clouds, or in any cloud, or on-premises for that matter. So, we think the containerization movement, as an example, is a critically important decision that companies should be making. It determines the level of lock-in, the level of flexibility, and the level of tech debt that they’re going to accumulate over the years.

“We find CTOs and CIOs are used to thinking about security in an on-prem environment.”

Whether you are modernizing on-prem or you’re moving to Google or you’re moving to one of our competitors, we would recommend that you make a future-proof decision on architecture as opposed to what may seem like the most convenient near-term decision.

Minimizing lock-in is something we hear time and time again from customers. I would encourage people to look at how much the different clouds embrace open-source technology. That’s important not just from a lock-in standpoint, but from a security standpoint.

Security is obviously critically important. It needs to be front and center. We find CTOs and CIOs are used to thinking about security in an on-prem environment. They think about how to build walls around their systems. Almost by definition, when you move into the cloud, the walls disappear, and you need a different security model. You want a company that will support and innovate and is really investing in those security models.

Almost every CEO and CIO that I talk to right now is thinking about how his or her business is going to change in the next 10 years. Years ago we talked about “digital transformation.” Today we’re hearing more and more about “data-driven transformation,” the idea that one of the most valuable assets you have as a company is your data. Traditionally, those data assets have been locked in silos and you couldn’t get access to them. You couldn’t join the data. You didn’t have a full view of your supply chain or your customers. It’s important to figure out where can you get the most value out of the data that you have.

The big three are not alone

There are competitors to AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure. Oracle Cloud Platform, for instance, is available in 17 data centers distributed across North and South America, Asia, and Europe. Citrix Cloud for hosting remote desktops was introduced in 2015. IBM SmartCloud can be purchased as a public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud. IBM continues to invest in its platform and services offerings, as evidenced through the recent acquisition of RedHat.11

VMware has had an important role to play in the world of cloud. Its Hypervisor was the first commercially successful virtualization technology and is the basis of many enterprise private clouds. VMware introduced its own IaaS offering, vCloud Air, in May 2013.

Selecting the Right Provider

AWS has a head start on the competition, building out its suite of cloud services since 2005. It offers a broad range of services and platform configuration options and has a rich partner ecosystem. Its services are built to be enterprise-friendly so that they will appeal to CIOs as well as its core audience of developers.

Azure excels in enterprise-readiness and is a natural fit for organizations that already use Microsoft applications and systems in-house such as Office 365, Windows Server, and Active Directory, and can help these organizations transition easily to the cloud. While both AWS and Azure have PaaS capabilities, Microsoft has a strength in this area.

Google Cloud is popular with cloud-native organizations and has a strong presence within the open source community. However, they are a newer entrant and have traditionally struggled to break into the enterprise market. A key strength of Google Cloud is its innovation and leadership in the areas of machine learning with its internal expertise in AI and TensorFlow.

In many cases, most companies have a multi-cloud strategy and are using multiple vendors. There are several benefits to this approach including mitigating vendor lock-in, ability to leverage best of breed capabilities, cost reduction, and increased application reliability.

Chapter 7 Takeaways

Cloud adoption is fast becoming the de facto option for new services. After many years of being considered hype and an upcoming trend, the cloud is now a tested and tried option for modern enterprise IT. In fact, in many cases it is considered a business imperative and a critical requirement for enterprise agility. Organizations that fail to acknowledge the benefits may soon find themselves left behind by both their users and their competitors.

Some considerations when selecting the cloud service and provider for your business needs:

• Evaluate the cloud service based on availability in region and services offered; ascertain your organization’s risk profile and map the required security controls to the available service to identify gaps and determine mitigation steps.
• Identify responsibility splits between your organization, the cloud service provider, and the application vendor for SaaS applications so a clear responsibility matrix can be outlined.
• Understand the service terms and conditions offered by the cloud service provider and be aware of any additional regulatory, compliance, and legislative clauses that you may have to comply with.
• Ensure that the service provider you select is a trusted partner that you can work with on your cloud journey. Understand its support and operations model and ensure that this aligns with your end user and business goals.

In the next chapter, we will discuss how the modern IT organization and C-Suite are evolving to adapt to the mega-trends, and to embark on cloud transformation.