At Platform9, we work daily with some of the leading enterprises, across a wide range of industries – from Financial Services, Internet, Retail, Embedded, and more. A key question we get asked often is how enterprises can transition to becoming Cloud Native (CN) or Digitally Native (DN) businesses. The journey to becoming a truly software-driven, digital-native organizations requires enterprises to develop cultural practices and technology capabilities that support three main goals:
- Corporate IT needs to become aligned with and responsive to the lines of business and to the software delivery functions that are in charge of software and digital innovation.
- IT needs to lead the charge on fostering and enabling a culture of constant business innovation.
- The inevitable transformation in IT needs to be accompanied by a reduction in IT spend. Cloud modernization needs to not become a massive business transformation project that is bound to fail, and that is placing undue pressures on the company – both from a cost perspective, as well as processes and tooling.
Given the strains that digital disruption puts on IT Ops, we often see that large and complex enterprises that have invested in Cloud Management Platform (CMP) capabilities struggle to identify the highest priority areas to target across lines of business or in shared services, and can’t really realize the promise of CMPs to optimize their IT processes across various company initiatives. The CMP implementation often becomes another ‘Moby Dick’ endless chase, sucking time and resources and causing frustration throughout the organization, with often not a lot to show for it.
In this article (and three part series), I want to share our point of view and some insights into the fundamentals of Cloud Management capabilities that large enterprises need to put in place in order to support digital transformation in their organization, for both legacy infrastructure as well as new, modern applications and technologies.