The 6 Levels of Cloud Maturity
Finding success in the cloud remains a challenging task for many businesses. Organisations frequently overestimate the amount of work necessary while setting unrealistically high expectations for the benefits. A vicious cycle of blame, finger-pointing, and reaching for something—anything—that could be called a victory can be the unintended consequence.
When they uncover it, businesses may decide that they’ve had enough and halt the relocation process before fully utilising the cloud. However, by deferring meaningful transformation, companies will miss out on the cost and innovation advantages that prompted the cloud migration effort in the first place. Companies may come to consider the cloud as nothing more than an expensive boondoggle as migration prices rise and promised capabilities, functionalities, and applications fail to materialise.
What went wrong?
In many cases, the biggest blunder is thinking about the cloud incorrectly. Most people consider cloud migration a simple lift-and-shift procedure involving just moving programs from a company’s own data center to the cloud.
However, true cloud success at scale necessitates far more than lift-and-shift. It necessitates skill-fully navigating the shifting cloud world.
The dynamic cloud makes application scalability easier and makes it faster. It also makes it easier for development teams to respond to changes and execute them more rapidly. This isn’t a luxury; it’s a must for ensuring the availability of applications that require highly dynamic scaling, which may involve large unplanned spikes.
However, success in the dynamic cloud necessitates more extraordinary dedication than lift-and-shift. Teams must proceed slowly and carefully, learning from their mistakes as they go. Most importantly, during a migration, everything must be measured.
This is the case because the sort of application and infrastructure visibility required changes following a move. Because many resources are becoming more dynamic, keeping track of which resources are crucial for which reasons are becoming more vibrant. Furthermore, apps now run on infrastructure that is not under the direct authority of a team. It can be challenging to discern if the application or the cloud service causes an issue unless the program and the cloud it operates are closely monitored.
Fortunately, mastering the dynamic cloud does not have to be frightening or dangerous. Adopting the cloud is a continuous learning experience that may be safely and successfully. Organisations must be willing to learn and modify cloud products to match their needs and expectations with what the cloud can give.
There are six different stages of cloud maturity.
You can’t expect to get there all at once, for example. During the cloud adoption process, enterprises progress via six basic maturity levels:
- Experimenting with Clouds: What is a Cloud?
- Can we trust the cloud when it comes to security?
- Servers and SaaS enablement: Lift-and-shift is proof that the cloud works pretty effectively.
- Creating opportunities for value-added services: The use of a dynamic cloud becomes commonplace.
- Enabling one-of-a-kind services: The concept of dynamic cloud is firmly embedded in the culture.
- Why do we need our data centers if we can use the cloud?
It is critical to recognise a continuum of cloud maturity and to comprehend the consequences for an organisation’s activities and procedures to shift to the cloud successfully. Moving from one maturity level to the next isn’t always simple, nor is it often quick, and the specifics vary for each business. Visibility of applications and infrastructure is frequently missing from cloud maturing strategies, limiting and obstructing successful cloud adoption.
Finally, enterprises may choose a cloud maturity level appropriate for their culture and circumstances. That’s fine, even if it falls short of the highest level.
Level 1: Playing around with the cloud
Safe technologies—technologies that apply in simple ways to applications and sections of systems that are often less mission-critical—are used in this first tentative step towards the cloud.
Level 1 entails using the cloud to evaluate how cloud services perform for a single, essential portion of an application. Because it’s simple to store some things in the cloud and avoid dealing with the complex procedures and servers an application relies on. A storage solution like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is frequently the first service used.
This stage typically begins as a one-time experiment where one or more teams do stand-alone migrations. No cloud policies are being developed; instead, the focus is on determining what the cloud is.
Level 2: Cloud security
Level 2 is a vital stage in creating a company’s cloud culture, as it involves disciplines from throughout the organization—legal, financial, security, and so on.
This is when a company’s policies on using the cloud start to take shape. The specific nature of these recommendations, ranging from formal regulations to ad-hoc “business culture” understandings, isn’t essential. What matters is that the entire organisation participates and that all stakeholders have a say.
This is also the place to think about application visibility and monitoring mechanisms. The purpose is to provide answers to questions such as:
- How can we keep track of simple apps as they migrate to the cloud?
- Is that monitoring technique capable of handling the dynamic changes accompanying future cloud maturity?
Do we have a clear understanding of how our new cloud infrastructure works?
Companies that don’t make it past this step are unlikely to succeed in the cloud.
Level 3: Using cloud-based servers and apps
When a business begins to replace on-premise servers and other backend resources, it has reached the third stage of cloud maturity. These are still simple lift-and-shift apps, with the core premise of “Let’s just move an app to the cloud and see what happens.”
This level should result in a grasp of how the cloud operates from the perspective of a whole application. This is the critical phase at which the organisation starts to see tangible benefits (reduced costs, more flexibility, etc.) from using the cloud.
Level 3 also refers to when an organisation’s data center-based application visibility and monitoring procedures are expanded to the cloud. These monitoring and visibility tactics become critical to ensuring the success of an application transfer.
But be careful: Level 3 can be a dangerous place. If companies try to assess the value of running apps in the cloud at this stage, they may discover that they are paying for the cloud without receiving the benefits. This might lead to firms giving up and viewing their entire cloud initiative as a failure.
Level 4: Enabling managed services with extra value
Of course, the cloud is much more than a location for companies to host apps on servers outside of their data centers. At Level 4, businesses start utilising some of the cloud’s value-added services.
“Okay, now that I have a database on the cloud, I still have to manage it,” a typical Level 4 dialogue may go. “However, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and everyone else offers managed databases.” Why don’t I delegate database management to them?”
Businesses use cloud-based managed services like Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Aurora. They could also choose Amazon Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon Elasticsearch Service to give even more value to their apps.
As the dynamic cloud begins to take effect in this area, the cloud’s most significant advantages become apparent. Companies also commit to utilising the cloud for at least some of their strategic apps and services at this point.
Level 5: Enabling services that are only available in the cloud
When a business becomes cloud-enabled, it may take advantage of high-value, cloud-specific services. These services are built for the dynamic cloud and are only available in cloud-based setups. Server less computing (like AWS Lambda), highly scalable schema less databases (like Amazon DynamoDB), data warehousing (Amazon Redshift), and other generalised services like queuing (Amazon Simple Queue Service, or SQS), and notification (Amazon Simple Notification Service, or SNS) are among them.
The notion of dynamic cloud is fully integrated into an organisation’s application development and management operations at Level 5. At this point, it’s critical to ensure that your monitoring approach provides you with the insight you need into these highly dynamic applications.
These services are also bound to a particular cloud provider. While several cloud providers provide server less features, each one does so uniquely. As companies begin to use these higher-value, cloud-only services, they become entangled with the cloud and individual cloud providers.
Level 6: Making the cloud obligatory
This is the highest level of cloud adoption maturity. When a company reaches Level 6, the cloud can satisfy most, if not all, of its data center requirements while also providing extra value-added services. Many businesses then raise the obvious question: “Why do we need our data centers?” Why do we need to be in the data center business in the first place?”
At the very least, new apps at Level 6 will default to running in the cloud rather than in a data center, and the organisation will have to justify why they need to be in a data center. However, the ultimate goal is to shift all applications to the cloud so that the company can shut down its data centers.
This is particularly frequent among cloud-native businesses, although more established companies may prefer to keep their old data centers in place for the time being. Nonetheless, an increasing number of traditional companies are migrating to the cloud and abandoning the business of managing data centers.
The ideal location
Individual applications, companies, and entire businesses can all benefit from the six degrees of cloud computing maturity. However, the cloud maturity level of a specific application may be higher or lower than the organisation’s overall maturity level.
Internal apps, for example, are early candidates for cloud migration since they have a lower risk of negatively influencing customers and the business itself. In reality, an internal application could reach Level 6 while the rest remains at Level 1.
In some instances, the interaction between application and enterprise maturity might generate a sweet cloud adoption spot. Many businesses and apps tend to trend toward this point on the maturity curve. Companies—and individual applications—tend to travel fast upwards into this sweet spot, but they tend to slow down the migration process once there.
Reaching the sweet spot isn’t necessarily a good or negative thing; it’s merely a reflection of the reality that the early phases of cloud adoption may provide the best ROI. Depending on the application, company culture, business processes, and business needs, moving beyond the sweet spot may or may not make sense.
About Enteros
Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It proactively identifies root causes of complex business-impacting database scalability and performance issues across a growing number of RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.
The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Enteros Inc. This blog may contain links to the content of third-party sites. By providing such links, Enteros Inc. does not adopt, guarantee, approve, or endorse the information, views, or products available on such sites.
Are you interested in writing for Enteros’ Blog? Please send us a pitch!
RELATED POSTS
Revolutionizing Healthcare IT: Leveraging Enteros, FinOps, and DevOps Tools for Superior Database Software Management
- 21 November 2024
- Database Performance Management
In the fast-evolving world of finance, where banking and insurance sectors rely on massive data streams for real-time decisions, efficient anomaly man…
Optimizing Real Estate Operations with Enteros: Harnessing Azure Resource Groups and Advanced Database Software
In the fast-evolving world of finance, where banking and insurance sectors rely on massive data streams for real-time decisions, efficient anomaly man…
Revolutionizing Real Estate: Enhancing Database Performance and Cost Efficiency with Enteros and Cloud FinOps
In the fast-evolving world of finance, where banking and insurance sectors rely on massive data streams for real-time decisions, efficient anomaly man…
Enteros in Education: Leveraging AIOps for Advanced Anomaly Management and Optimized Learning Environments
In the fast-evolving world of finance, where banking and insurance sectors rely on massive data streams for real-time decisions, efficient anomaly man…