Specialised cloud solutions - Answer to the cloud conundrum

The cloud conundrum

Cloud plays a crucial role in your digital transformation journey. It acts as a ‘force multiplier’ that brings multiple next-generation technologies together for digital transformation. Organisations across geographies, sectors and industries are migrating and modernising their digital assets (infra, apps and data) to the cloud due to its widely recognised benefits, including cost reduction, improved operational efficiency, speed to market, improved customer experience and a better security posture. The COVID-19 pandemic played a major role in driving enterprises to adopt cloud.

However, despite its advantages, only about 30% of enterprise workloads have been moved to the cloud. Concerns about security, governance, cloud cost, lack of expertise, delay and uncertainty in cloud migration programmes, and modernisation of complex and legacy enterprise applications (both custom and COTS) pose challenges for broader cloud adoption. These challenges create what is often referred to as the cloud conundrum. While enterprises and C-Suite are eager to benefit from cloud transformation, inherent deterrents stop them from realising its full potential and migrating/modernising key enterprise systems to the cloud.

Evolution of specialised cloud solutions

The evolution of specialised cloud solutions over nearly two decades has enabled more efficient strategies to address the cloud conundrum, allowing enterprises to migrate larger workloads to the cloud with greater ease.

The S-curve of innovation represents innovation/competitive advantage/product enhancements. As time progresses, innovation or growth starts from a slow initial phase and goes through an accelerated and scaled interval before it stabilises and matures. As technology loses its competitive advantage, the need for a revolutionary change arises in an innovation window (paradigm), which results in a new S-curve.

Cloud 1.0: The foundation (compute, storage and networking)

AWS released a cloud-based storage solution, S3, in 2006 and followed it up with the EC2 compute service, SimpleDB database and Google App Engine. Within a few years, they launched a number of services, including Load Balancer, DNS and Managed Hadoop Solution. Azure was launched in 2010. Until 2012, organisations were exploring the potential benefits of the cloud and performing proof of concept (POC). Afterwards, organisations began migrating simple and moderate-sized applications to the cloud by mostly using the lift and shift or rehost/replatform approach. By 2015–16, many organisations had 10–15% of their enterprise workloads running in AWS, Azure or GCP.

Cloud 2.0: Platform as a Service (PaaS), containers and serverless

2015–16 onwards, managed solutions and PaaS solutions like containers, serverless, data lake and Data Warehouse as a Service (DWaaS) gained importance. Each hyperscaler released a number of solutions for workloads. For example, AWS released a plethora of database solutions, including relational databases, key-value databases, document-oriented databases, wide column databases and more specialised solutions like time series databases, graph databases and ledger databases. The same approach was adopted by all hyperscalers for containers, compute, storage and networking. While the wide array of choices increased public cloud adoption manyfold, the percentage of enterprise workload on the cloud did not extend beyond 20%.

Cloud 3.0: Specialised cloud solutions

Since 2020, CSPs and hyperscalers have focused on specialised cloud solutions. The wider definition of cloud now entails not just public cloud but also private cloud, edge and distributed cloud. Hyperscalers have come up with specialised solutions for complex workloads, such as mainframe migration solutions by AWS and Azure. Following is a list of specialised cloud solutions:

1. Industry cloud – Industry cloud is a set of cloud services that are designed to meet the requirements of industries like banking, retail, manufacturing and pharma. Generic cloud solutions, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), PaaS and Software as a Service (SaaS), do not meet their requirements. For example, a regulated industry like banking and financial services has very specific requirements for security, regulations, compliance and data security. Cloud solutions like IBM Cloud for Financial Services or Azure for Financial Services are designed to provide specific services that cater to these needs.
2. Distributed cloud – One of the key challenges of using hybrid cloud is that you need to run different cloud services on public and private cloud. This results in the fragmentation of the solution, which can lead to increased operational complexity. For example, the cloud services, including Managed Kubernetes Solution, serverless or Database as a Service, that you use on a particular public cloud service provider, such as Azure, cannot be used on private cloud, such as VMware, or on a different cloud service provider, such as AWS or GCP, as these services are tied with a specific cloud service provider. Distributed cloud solutions address this challenge by allowing you to run public cloud services of one provider on private cloud, third-party data centres, colocation centres and another cloud service provider. These solutions are new in the market, and their examples include Google Distributed Cloud, IBM Cloud Satellite, etc.
3. Sovereign cloud – Sovereign cloud plays an important role in addressing digital sovereignty, which refers to the ability of nations, organisations and individuals to maintain control over their digital assets and data. Components of sovereign cloud include data sovereignty, data centre and infrastructure localisation, operational sovereignty, network isolation, software sovereignty (eliminates reliance on proprietary software by replacing it with open source software or regionally built software like India Stack technologies available in India), and support on local laws and regulations. Regions like Europe, China, the Middle East and India have become major players in sovereign cloud. For example, in Europe, the Gaia-X sovereign cloud initiative has been launched to help grow a sovereign cloud ecosystem for European countries and organisations. In recent times, apart from hyperscalers, regional cloud providers and telecom vendors have also started providing cloud solutions. These solutions are gaining traction in government, defence and intelligence sectors, as well as among enterprises in India, the Middle East, China and Europe. Examples of sovereign cloud solutions available in India are Yotta Enterprise Cloud and Shakti Cloud.
4. Cloud sustainability – Cloud can help you achieve your sustainability targets. It helps reduce carbon/CO2 emissions (direct or indirect), minimises unrecyclable waste and lessens the environmental impact on essential resources like clean water. New cloud regions and data centres by hyperscalers and cloud service providers utilise green energy and next-generation efficient hardware and infrastructure, which significantly reduces electricity consumption and lowers carbon emissions.
5. Mainframe and legacy modernisation solutions – Migrating and modernising mainframe and legacy applications to the cloud has always been a complex task. Cloud service providers and third-party independent software vendors (ISVs) have launched full-fledged mainframe and legacy modernisation solutions that simplify this task. For example, AWS Mainframe Modernisation Services help with refactoring, replatforming, data and file transfer to the cloud, application testing, DevOps and CI/CD. These services allow you to refactor legacy code from COBOL, PL/1 and RPG/400 to Java and the latest web frameworks. You can also replatform COBOL and PL/I applications into mainframe-compatible managed runtime in the cloud, which reduces the need to change the code. These services enable a streamlined migration of mainframe and other legacy applications to the cloud.
6. Cloud management and operation platforms – Cloud operations and management pose various challenges during the post-migration/modernisation phase. These include issues related to cloud automation, provisioning, platform engineering, cloud costs management (FinOps), regulation and compliance operations, security, and other operational aspects. Cloud management platforms (CPMs) and cloud operation services offered by hyperscalers and other third-party solution providers have advanced significantly in recent years, enabling effective management of your IT estate and operations in the cloud. This is expected to greatly enhance the cloud momentum for enterprises, resulting in the migration of more complex and business-critical workloads to the cloud. This shift could potentially lead to 70–80% of workloads being migrated to the cloud.