IT Operational Excellence
When IT departments are tuned to run their best, they achieve more, spend less and drive success back into the organisations they support.
IT operational excellence is an approach that helps to ensure IT departments run efficiently and deliver great service. Without an operational excellence philosophy, IT departments lack vision and strategy, are slow to adapt and are more likely to be bogged down by trivial issues.
Achieving IT operational excellence isn't about implementing one particular framework. It is a mindset geared towards continuous improvement and performance that incorporates multiple principles designed to align team goals around delivering value to the customer.
IBRS can help organisations achieve IT operational excellence by revealing the most effective ways to leverage resources and identify the most valuable activities and differentiators in a given IT team.
Conclusion:
This month has seen increased discussions regarding the need for digital transformation in the face of changing customer needs. Distributed workforce environments, ongoing shifts in operational structures, and the need to respond to customer demands quickly have driven the need for transformation efforts. Reduced costs, improved service levels, and differentiation have become priorities for organisations, with a focus on utilising technologies that can support business changes whilst retaining the resiliency of internal solutions. Organisations are also prioritising reduced infrastructure deployments and the elimination of dependency on technologies that can become dated, unstable or unable to support changes in business operations. Vendors have found the provision of adaptive platforms that are tightly integrated are in high demand. Service providers need to leverage a range of solutions that can slot together and are sufficiently flexible to adapt and be altered to meet changing customer needs quickly, all at once maintaining solution resiliency.
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- Irene Pimentel
Conclusion: This month has seen an increased focus on discussions regarding supply chain disruptions. While demand for ICT products and associated services remains strong, if supply chain issues cannot be averted or accommodated, disruptions experienced can have an adverse impact on a business’ ability to operate. Supply chain issues, as well as sudden shifts in supply or demand can impact on sales and general company operations. To ensure the continued delivery of business-critical products and services, digital transformation efforts are required to reduce the impact of supply chain disruptions and minimise effects on business operations. Vendors can assist with establishing protocols, supply chain resilience and maintenance as well as ensure a well-managed supply chain remains a business priority.
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- Irene Pimentel
Conclusion: One of the immediate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic was the closure of offices and the move to remote working conditions. Some businesses were able to immediately execute this as part of their business continuity plan (BCP). Now that the crisis has become the business-as-usual state, challenges have also begun to appear and BCPs need revising to adapt to this new situation.
The employer’s ability to provide the right set of tools goes back to technology and infrastructure investments made prior to the crisis. With a huge percentage of the population online, not just businesses but also schools, government agencies, and communities, there may be a need to update systems and invest in more infrastructure. However, it will not be as easy as purchasing products. It requires understanding workforce behaviour, emerging needs, and trends. As with any change, it will be crucial to maintain organisational culture and connection.
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- Mike Mitchelmore
Disaster Recovery (DR) planning is much more than just developing a DR plan. Building your organisation’s maturity to successfully recover from a disaster scenario is an exercise in continuous improvement. Recently, IBRS hosted a webinar to address four IBRS advisory papers focusing on the steps needed to successfully plan for DR and build the maturity of the organisations DR planning processes. The end game; to improve the likelihood of mitigating an ICT disaster event to ensure business success. Disaster Recovery Must Work!
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- Mike Mitchelmore
Conclusion: This month has seen a rise in outsourcing project implementations. In particular, the completion of migration, consolidation and transformation efforts have been prominent. Whilst this work is critical, developing, then commencing and conducting successful projects can be difficult. After completion, ongoing monitoring and assessment of projects is required. Without careful planning and strategic approaches to align new projects with business objectives, organisations can be vulnerable to technical capability gaps, as well as inappropriate systems and tools that fail to fulfill technical objectives. Hasty, short-term solutions can result in partially implemented or inadequate systems that can decrease a company’s ability to innovate, reduce the capacity to respond to competitive threats, and excessive, unexpected costs. When planning projects, it is important to engage specialists that can assist with a strategic, long-term approach to project planning, implementation, and ongoing review.
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- Irene Pimentel
When your business faces a disaster it is key to address the issue head on. You must first understand who's problem it is to solve and create an effective disaster recovery (DR) plan. Both business and ICT need to be comfortable that the DR plan has been verified to ensure a reasonable expectation that recovery will be successful. IBRS has created a 4 part series to help organisations plan for and recover from disasters successfully. Download the 'disaster recovery must work ebook' and prepare your organisation.
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- Mike Mitchelmore
Conclusion:
This month, discussions regarding mergers and acquisitions have been prominent, in particular the high level of activity in ICT services companies. A number of companies have attributed growth to past acquisitions, announced intentions to acquire particular firms or flagged acquisition activity as a strategic priority. Associated actions, such as rebranding, restructuring, and capital raising efforts have also been discussed. The need to remain competitive in current environments, utilising mergers and acquisitions to help evolve businesses has become clear. These transactions can be highly beneficial when expansion plans include re-engineering core business lines, or developing new and targeted specialisations. However, when looking into acquisitions, it is important to plan carefully, intertwine activities with current company strategies and ensure a balance between a company’s existing strengths and stretching newly acquired specialities.
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- Irene Pimentel
Conclusion:
In the modern business landscape, ICT products and services are becoming more and more critical to the success of the business. It is now more common than not that ICT products and services are being delivered through outsourcing of some kind, using Software-as-a Service (SaaS) or Cloud service providers (CSPs). Innovating improvements to the business can become a challenge when your organisation is tied to delivery of ICT services under contract; most very specific in nature but key to delivering success.
The key to successful innovation is situational awareness across both the business and the ICT environment. The result of being able to achieve situational awareness will enable both business units and ICT to innovate with their eyes wide open to both the opportunities and constraints impacting the business. The true cost and time to market the innovation presents, can then be clearly understood against the benefits envisaged.
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- Mike Mitchelmore
Conclusion:
This month, discussions regarding security threats to third party suppliers have been prominent. With malicious actors targeting new technologies and work methods, it has become critical for customers to assess and conduct ongoing reviews of third party supplier security prior to establishing partnerships, particularly critical systems providers. A rigorous security strategy and ongoing maintenance is required to safeguard customer data and internal systems. Third party suppliers require the ability to deal with irregular activities, as well as technical controls and policies that correlate with their customers. Supplier vulnerabilities can result in operations and compliance risks, necessitating professionals to develop, implement and audit third party risk management strategies and processes. It also requires security professionals to conduct ongoing audits, establish plans for third party incident responses, and the implementation of restricted access mechanisms. Customers can strengthen their resistance and attack containment mechanisms with professionals to help detect, analyse, contain, and respond to security threats.
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- Irene Pimentel
Conclusion:
Part four in this series of advisories looks at how to improve the disaster recovery (DR) planning maturity of your organisation. The focus of improving maturity in DR planning is to improve your probability of successfully meeting the needs of your business in the event of a disaster. Ensuring your DR plan (DRP) and business continuity planning (BCP) are fully integrated and that all elements of the organisation have a high degree of familiarity with DR processes.
Importantly, your organisation must understand that maturity is both a journey and a target. To maintain the target maturity, your organisation must put in place a number of strategies that will be continually repeated to ensure the target is both met and maintained.
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- Mike Mitchelmore
Conclusion:
When considering the level of Microsoft/Office and licensing, the biggest conundrum is generally around E3 versus E5 licensing. E3 licensing is closest to the capabilities organisations have had with perpetual licensing for the Office Pro suite. E5 licensing adds a slew of new services, including security, analytics, and advanced e-discovery and enterprise voice.
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- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion:
Part three of this four part series looks at how the disaster recovery (DR) plan can be verified. The DR plan is in effect a contingency plan to deal with risk of a disaster. The DR test plan is a validation of the preparedness of the organisation to address these risks.
The need to have a DR plan verified is therefore essential if the contingency is to be effective. Just having a plan in place is not enough to mitigate the risk. The plan must be tested and verified as part of business as usual (BAU) to both increase familiarity with the plan, its standard operating procedures (SOPs) and processes, and most importantly, improve the likelihood of success.
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- Mike Mitchelmore
Conclusion:
This month, discussions regarding security threats to managed services providers (MSPs) have been prominent. In the past, cyber criminals and ransomware gangs have targeted MSPs to gain access to corporate networks. Outsourcing IT administration can leave clients vulnerable when MSPs are given highly privileged access to customer systems. Remote management tools can also leave vendors open to attacks. It is imperative that MSP offerings and managed services provide a comprehensive and dedicated suite of technologies and skills to defend vendor security. A clear strategic approach for clients is necessary in order to address the difficulties associated with recent security threats.
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- Irene Pimentel
Conclusion:
Chargeback of enterprise-wide ICT costs were developed to assign ICT costs to the point of usage. The outcome is twofold; it ensures the initial allocation of ICT assets and services are identifiable, and it enables reallocation of underutilised or unnecessary services. This relies on IT creating assets and services which are commodified and transferable.
A chargeback arrangement can increase tension between ICT and the department managers. Allocating all ICT costs to achieve a zero-sum IT department can exacerbate that tension. Making IT fully responsible and accountable for IT costs can create insular behaviours which stifle innovation and investments in new IT services for departments. Departments will feel entitled to explore ICT improvements without an effective relationship with IT. Creating a chargeback governance model that manages disputes and builds trust in the process is preferable.
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- Mark Unwin
Conclusion:
This month, discussions regarding changes to company structures and operations have been prominent. An increased demand for transformation and internal enhancements has prompted managed service providers to further develop their firms. Streamlining and redeveloping customer products and offerings to meet specific targets has been a particular focus, as well as using predictive techniques and tools to respond to customer needs. In an effort to meet demands, service providers require transparency with customers, and improved offerings for their clients and business partners. This will assist vendors when delivering products, services and support to their customers, and drive their productivity and growth.
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- Irene Pimentel
Conclusion:
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementation involves identifying whether VDI can be done internally or outsourced through a third party, seeking out and engaging a supplier, and finally, determining the cost-effective and efficient way to deploy the service.
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- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion:
The need to have a disaster recovery (DR) plan that is understood, agreed, and jointly owned by all elements of the organisation is essential in preparing for a disaster event. An effective DR plan will focus on managing the risk associated with completing a successful restoration and recovery in a time, and to a level of effectiveness, acceptable to business.
To ensure the plan is effective at mitigating the risks associated with completion of restoration and resumption of services after a disaster event; the DR plan must also clearly identify how the plan is to be verified and therefore reduce the risk of not completing a successful disaster recovery.
The key focus of the DR plan must always be about the restoring delivery of business functions. The technical delivery may be from ICT services on-premise, outsourced providers, or Cloud. Regardless of technical delivery to business, the impact of an ICT disaster event needs a verified plan!
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- Mike Mitchelmore
Conclusion:
This month, discussions regarding an increased demand for disaster recovery, business continuity and work management solutions has been prominent. While the pandemic has triggered fundamental IT changes in an effort to resolve gaps and vulnerabilities, the accelerated rate of digital transformation and migration efforts has resulted in shortfalls when planning and establishing new work environments. Vendors have found difficulties maintaining business processes when unforeseen or extreme events occur. Combined with management solutions that cannot cater to all scenarios and a lack of clarity regarding customer responsibilities when responses to operational failures are required, difficulties have arisen for service providers. This requires vendors to provide more detailed and clearer disaster recovery and business continuity plans for customers, as well as specialised management tools and associated resources to implement solutions and responses. It is also critical for vendors to communicate with customers to facilitate the recovery of processes and ensure all business systems can be utilised in new and dispersed working environments.
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- Irene Pimentel
We all hear that data is growing at exponential rates, and so too is the demand and complexity of data management practices. But does this mean you need to obtain the highest levels of data management and buy into the most sophisticated tool?
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- David Beal
Contract management can be more than just record keeping. When done well, it can enable organisations to explore the best ways to optimise their investments when conditions change.
This capability proved essential for the Australian government when COVID-19 hit, with investments in all manner of services and infrastructure being needed almost overnight.
IBRS interviews ZEN Enterprise, an Australian niche contract management solution vendor, and the contract manager from a large Australian agency to tease out the benefits and challenges of advanced contract management in an age of rapid change.
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- Joseph Sweeney
IBRSiQ is a database of Client inquiries and is designed to get you talking to our advisors about these topics in the context of your organisation in order to provide tailored advice for your needs.
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- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion
With the growth of dependence on ICT for business to perform effectively, many organisations have increased risk associated with the ability of ICT to provide service continuity. ICT downtime means business is negatively impacted. Many organisations believe the DRP is a problem that is ICTs to solve. Whilst ICT will lead the planning and do a lot of the heavy lifting when a disaster occurs, it can only be successful with the assistance and collaboration of its business partners. It will be the business that sets the priorities for restoration and accepts the risk.
Both business and ICT need to be comfortable that the disaster recovery (DR) plan has been verified to ensure a reasonable expectation that recovery will be successful.
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- Mike Mitchelmore
Conclusion
This month, discussions regarding project investment have been prominent. In particular, increases attributed to the changing threat environment and the constant emergence of new technologies. The resultant digital initiatives help create new opportunities or mitigate issues that can have a cascading and negative impact throughout operations. A continuous cycle of project investment is beneficial to improve business processes, resolve operational difficulties, as well as accelerate digital transformation. By delivering more efficient and innovative operations, companies can address new and shifting technology goals and expectations.
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- Irene Pimentel
Conclusion
Low-code solutions expand the entry-level for application development by enabling non-developers (a.k.a. citizen developers) and developers alike to create applications visually. Low-code platform solutions allow citizen developers to develop applications using WYSIWYG tools to create functional prototypes of applications that digitise special – often narrowly defined – business processes. This can be highly disruptive without clear policies (see ‘Non-techies Are Taking Over Your Developers’ Jobs – Dealing with the Fallout’). In addition, to avoid the Microsoft access problem of creating fragmented applications and processes, the ICT group needs to be involved in the selection of a low-code platform that provides not only eforms and workflow capabilities, but also governance features to avoid the chaos that can ensue from unfettered development.
Low-code platforms can be viewed as offering a spectrum of capabilities, as detailed in ‘How to Succeed with Eforms Part 1: Understand the Need'. To provide a smooth transition along the spectrum of development capabilities, organisations may either:
- introduce a second developer-focused low-code platform, since many citizen-developer-focused solutions have insufficient capabilities for developers.
- adopt a single, low-code platform that provides both the simplicity needed for citizen developers and the power needed for developers.
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- Joseph Sweeney
The Latest
28 April 2021: AWS has introduced AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift, a distributed and hardware-accelerated cache that, according to AWS, “delivers up to ten times better query performance than other enterprise Cloud data warehouses”.
Why it’s Important
AWS is not the only vendor that offers distributed analytics computing. Architectures from Domo and Snowflake both make use of elastic, distributed computing resources (often referred to as nodes) to enable analytics over massive data sets. These architectures not only speed up the analytics of data, but also provide massively parallel ingestion of data.
By introducing AQUA, AWS has added a layer of specialised, massively parallel and scalable cache over its Redshift analytics platform. This new layer comes at a cost, but initial calculations suggest it is a fraction of the cost of deploying and maintaining traditional big data analytics architecture, such as specialised BI hyperconverged appliances and databases.
Given the rapid growth in self-service data analytics (aka citizen analytics) organisations will face increasing demands to provide analytics services for increasing amounts of both highly curated data, and ‘other’ data with varied levels of quality. In addition, organisations need to consider a plan for rise in non-structured data.
As with email, we have reached a tipping point in the demands of performance, complexity and cost where Cloud delivered analytics outstrip on-premises in most scenarios. The question now becomes one of Cloud architecture, data governance and, most important of all, how to mature data literacy across your organisation.
Who’s impacted
- Business intelligence / analytics team leads
- Enterprise architects
- Cloud architects
What’s Next?
Organisations should reflect honestly on the way they are currently supporting business intelligence capabilities, and develop scenarios for Cloud-based analytics services.
This should include a re-evaluation of how adherence to compliance and regulations can be met with Cloud services, how data could be democratised, and the potential impact on the organisation. BAU cost should be considered, not just for the as-in state, but also for a potential future states. While savings are likely, such should not be the overriding factor: new capabilities and enabling self-service analytics are just as important.
Organisations should also evaluate data literacy maturity among staff, and if needed (likely) put in place a program to improve staff’s use of data.
Related IBRS Advisory
- IBRSiQ: AIS and Power BI Initiatives
- Workforce transformation: The four operating models of business intelligence
- Staff need data literacy – Here’s how to help them get it
- The critical link between data literacy and customer experience
- VENDORiQ: Fujitsu Buys into Australian Big Data with Versor Acquisition
- Details
- IBRSAdvisory
The Latest
29 April 2021: Microsoft briefed analysts on its expansion of Azure data centres throughout Asia. By the end of 2021, Microsoft will have multiple availability zones in every market where it has a data centre.
The expansion is driven in part by a need for additional Cloud capacity to meet greenfield growth. Each new availability zone is, in effect, an additional data centre of Cloud services capability.
However, the true focus is on providing existing Azure clients with expanded options for deploying services over multiple zones within a country.
Microsoft expects to see strong growth in organisations re-architecting solutions that had been deployed to the Cloud through a simple ‘lift and shift’ approach to take advantage of the resilience granted by multiple zones. Of course, there is a corresponding uplift in revenue for Microsoft as more clients take up multiple availability zones.
Why it’s Important
While there is an argument that moving workloads to Cloud services, such as Azure, has the potential to improve service levels and availability, the reality is that Cloud data centres do fail. Both AWS and Microsoft Azure have seen outages in their Sydney Australia data centres. What history shows is organisations that had adopted a multiple availability zone architecture tended to have minimal, if any, operational impact when a Cloud data centre goes down.
It is clear that a multiple availability zone approach is essential for any mission critical application in the Cloud. However, such applications are often geographically bound by compliance or legislative requirements. By adding additional availability zones within countries throughout the region, Microsoft is removing a barrier for migrating critical applications to the Cloud, as well as driving more revenue from existing clients.
Who’s impacted
- Cloud architecture teams
- Cloud cost / procurement teams
What’s Next?
Multiple available zone architecture can be considered on the basis of future business resilience in the Cloud. It is not the same thing as ‘a hot disaster recovery site’ and should be viewed as a foundational design consideration for Cloud migrations.
Related IBRS Advisory
- VENDORiQ: Amazon Lowers Storage Costs… But at What Cost?
- Vendor Lock-in Using Cloud: Golden Handcuffs or Ball and Chain?
- Running IT-as-a-Service Part 49: The case for hybrid Cloud migration
- Details
- IBRSAdvisory
The Latest
18 March 2021: Veeam released a report which suggests that 58% of backups fail. After validating these claims, and from the direct experiences of our advisors who have been CIOs or infrastructure managers in previous years, IBRS accepts there is merit in Veeam’s claim.
The real question is, what to do about it, other than buying into Veeam’s sales pitch that its backups give greater reliability?
Why it’s Important
Sophisticated ransomware attacks are on the rise. So much so that IBRS issued a special alert on the increasing risks in late March 2021. Such ransomware attacks specifically target backup repositories. This means creating disconnected, or highly-protected backups is more important than ever. The only guarantee for recovery from ransomware is a combination of well-structured backups, coupled with a well-rehearsed cyber incident response plan.
However, protecting the backups is only useful if those backups can be recovered. IBRS estimates around 10-12% of backups fail to fully recover, which is measuring a slightly different, but more important situation than touted by Veeam. Even so, this failure rate is still far too high, given heightened risk from financially-motivated ransomware attacks.
Who’s impacted
- CIO
- Risk Officers reporting to the board
- CISCO
- Infrastructure leads
What’s Next?
IBRS has identified the ‘better-practice’ from backup must include regular and unannounced, practice runs to recover critical systems from backups. These tests should be run to simulate as closely as possible to events that could lead to a recovery situation: critical system failures, malicious insider and ransomware. Just as organisations need to rehearse cyber incident responses, they also need to thoroughly test their recovery regime.
Related IBRS Advisory
- Maintaining disaster recovery plans
- Ransomware: Don’t just defend, plan to recover
- Running IT-as-a-Service Part 59: Recovery from ransomware attacks
- Ransomware, to pay or not to pay?
- ICT disaster recovery plan challenges
- Testing your business continuity plan
- Details
- IBRSAdvisory
The Latest
28 March 2021: AWS has a history of periodically lowering the costs of storage. But even with this typical behaviour, its recent announcement of an elastic storage option that shaves 47% off current service prices is impressive. Or is it?
The first thing to realise is that the touted savings are not apples for apples. AWS’s new storage offering is cheaper because it resides in a single-zone, rather than being replicated across multiple zones. In short, the storage has a higher risk of being unavailable, or even being lost by an outright failure.
Why it’s Important
AWS has not hidden this difference. It makes it clear that the lower cost comes from less redundancy. Yet this architectural nuance may be overlooked when looking at ways to optimise Cloud costs.
One of the major benefits of moving to Platform-as-a-Service offerings is the increased resilience and availability of the architecture. Cloud vendors, including AWS, do suffer periodic failures within zones. Examples include the AWS Sydney outage in early 2020 and the Sydney outage in 2016 which impacted banking and e-commerce services.
But it is important to note that even though some of Australia’s top companies were effectively taken offline by the 2016 outage, others just sailed on as if little had happened. The difference is how these companies had leveraged the redundancies available within Cloud platforms. Those that saw little impact to operations when the AWS Sydney went down had selected redundancies in all aspects of their solutions.
Who’s impacted
- Cloud architects
- Cloud cost/contract specialists
- Applications architects
- Procurement leads
What’s Next?
The lesson from previous Australian AWS outages is that organisations need to carefully match the risk of specific application downtime. This new announcement shows that significant savings (in this case 47%) are possible by accepting a greater risk profile. However, while this may be attractive from a pure cost optimisation/procurement perspective, it also needs to be tempered with an analysis of the worst case scenario, such as multiple banks being unable to process credit card payments in supermarkets for an extended period.
Related IBRS Advisory
- VENDORiQ: AWS second data centre in Australia
- Post COVID-19: Four new BCP considerations
- Running IT-as-a-Service Part 55: IBRS Infrastructure Maturity Model
- Details
- IBRSAdvisory
Conclusion
This month, discussions regarding customer and employee experience solutions have been prominent. New remote working models have driven demand for products and services which support improved customer and employee experience solutions. Customer engagement services that can align business goals and needs with IT services and infrastructure are required to avoid the implementation of solutions that interfere with business processes. Data science tools, solutions and a combination of information from different sources can help vendors retain a focus on customer metrics that drive business growth. They also help to manage operations, supply chain issues and provide a greater understanding of changes underlying customer and employee behaviours.
- Details
- Irene Pimentel
The Latest
20 March 2021: GorillaStack has released capabilities that allows it to monitor and apply governance rules to any external service that communicates with AWS EventBridge.
Why it’s Important
GorillaStack is one of the earliest vendors to address the complexities of Cloud cost management, having started in Australia in 2015 and moved to having strong growth in the international market. In May 2020, GorillaStack was acquired by the switzerland-based SoftwareOne.
Like its international competitors, GorillaStack moved from helping organisations monitor and optimise their Cloud spend, to monitoring the Cloud ecosystems for performance and security concerns. This recent announcement suggests that the next phase of growth for organisations in the Cloud cost optimisation space is not only to detect events in Cloud infrastructure, but also external services, and then apply rules to perform specific actions on those events. Such rules can not only automatically help reduce Cloud spend by enforcing financial governance directly into the Cloud infrastructure, but also helping to enforce security rules.
Who’s Impacted
- CIO
- Development team leads
- Business analysts
What’s Next?
Cloud cost optimisation is already an important discipline for organisations with mature Cloud teams. Like software asset management (SAM), tools alone will not see organisations optimise their expenditure on Cloud services. An understanding of the disciplines required and setting up appropriate rules is needed. In addition, IBRS notes that many less-mature organisations have a ‘sprawl’ of Cloud services that need to first be identified and then reigned in before cost optimisations products can be fully effective.
Related IBRS Advisory
- New Generation IT Service Management Tools Part 2: Multi-Cloud Management
- How to Get on Top of Cloud Billing
- Sourcing Monthly April 2020 – May 2020
- Details
- IBRSAdvisory
The Latest
25 February 2021: Microsoft has announced a new industry Microsoft Cloud product suite. In short, Microsoft is pivoting to deliver vertical market Cloud offering for: Financial Services, Manufacturing, Non-profit and Retail on the back of the success with the Microsoft Healthcare Cloud. The primary purpose of these tailored industry solutions is to meet specific needs, breakdown silos and increase collaboration, productivity and efficiency within and across Industries.
Is this new or are we seeing a response to similar Cloud SaaS verticals from Salesforce and Netsuite?
Why it’s Important
Whether it is regulatory compliance or creating efficiencies, Microsoft is the latest to develop industry driven verticals offerings under the Microsoft Cloud banner. Whilst each MS Cloud solution addresses specific industry needs it also makes a concerted effort to take the existing Microsoft software products suites and add new capabilities to M365, Azure, Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform.
This level of investment by Microsoft in Cloud specific solutions should reduce the need for industries to invest heavily in their own solutions and instead adopt a common off the shelf SaaS solution. But will this provide competitive advantage for industries or will it make everything vanilla over time. Microsoft is planning continuous engagement with Industry leaders to ensure constant innovation so the industry Clouds do not become a one size fits all, set and forget approach.
Who’s impacted
- CIO
- CDO
- Digital Supply Chain
- Enterprise Architecture
- Software Architecture Leads
What’s Next?
Monitor the release of these industry specific Microsoft Cloud solutions in March 2021. As with Microsoft Power Platform products, much of the pricing remains a mystery for these Cloud offerings. By all means get access to release information and hopefully a private preview from March 2021 so you can see if the industry solution really meets your business needs.
Related IBRS Advisory
- Book at an advisory session to explore how Microsoft’s Strategy impacts your organisation
- Pros and Cons of Going All-In With Microsoft
- Google Workspace for Education - From Free to Fee
- Oracle’s new federal government Cloud capabilities
- Details
- IBRSAdvisory
Conclusion:
This month, discussions regarding artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous solutions have been prominent. As customers become aware of the potential benefits of adopting new solutions, vendors must be capable of clarifying the associated risks. This will allow vendors to respond to rising customer expectations, particularly when they require faster responses to change or have larger, more complex projects. When comparatively new solutions are sought after, but possess market gaps or perceived weaknesses, vendors must be prepared to cater to them and facilitate transparency with customers regarding the unknowns. This will assist with maintaining the integrity of offerings and supporting customer interactions. While the failure to adopt new solutions quickly can result in disadvantages in the market, vendors need to exercise caution. Premature adoption without sufficient strategic planning, analysis as well as transparency with customers can result in unforeseen and negative outcomes.
- Details
- Irene Pimentel
The Latest
15 February 2021: IBM has unveiled the new Power Private Cloud (PPC) Rack solution which offers converged infrastructure with a focus on migrating legacy on-premises apps running on its POWER9/AIX systems to a Cloud-like infrastructure.
What’s Included
The PPC is effectively pre-built, pre-configured Cloud-like infrastructure for running containers.
The PPC Rack consists of three POWER System S922 servers with 20 CPU cores, 256GB of RAM, and 3.2TB of local storage, the FlashSystem 5200, with a minimum of 9.6TB, and twin SAN24B-6 switches with 24 Fibre Channel ports. The solution is pre-installed with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, IBM PowerVM Enterprise Edition, IBM Cloud PowerVC Manager, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and Red Hat OpenShift OpenShift Container Storage (OCS).
Why it’s Important
IBM’s new offer is effectively a container-centric, Cloud-like hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) similar to that offered by HPE, Dell, Lenovo, VMware, and Nutanix. More importantly, IBM is offering this at an easy target - its existing customers with legacy POWER9/AIX/i solutions looking to migrate to a Cloud-like environment with OpenStack.
For IBM clients, it presents a low-risk opportunity for extending the life of legacy applications, while modernising the environment.
Who’s impacted
- CIO
- Development team leads
- Business analysts
What’s Next?
Organisations moving legacy solutions into hyperscale Cloud infrastructure (IaaS) to meet the objectives of ‘Cloud first’ strategies have found that the proposed cost savings are not always present, and operational risks due to skills shortages can emerge. The rise of next-generation hyperconverged offering Cloud-like management is a response to this challenge.
IBM’s new offering shows how this grandfather of the industry, with a massive backlog of legacy solutions, will seek to re-secure its client’s investment in solutions, while smoothing the transition to Cloud-like architectures.
Related IBRS Advisory
- VENDORiQ: Woolworths Selects Dell Technologies Cloud to deploy hybrid Cloud strategy
- Running IT-as-a-Service Part 49: The case for hybrid Cloud migration
- Running IT-as-a-Service Part 50: Hybrid Cloud migration – Where is the money saving?
- Details
- IBRSAdvisory
The Latest
17 February 2021: Google Apigee announced the release of Apigee X, its latest edition of its API management solution.
Why it’s Important
IBRS has found that the topic of APIs has moved out of the boiler room to the boardroom. During a series of roundtables with CEOs, CFOs and Heads of HR in late 2019, IBRS noted that many of these executives were advocates for ‘API enabled enterprise solutions’. Upon further questioning, these non-technical executives were able to accurately describe the core concepts and purposes of APIs. Much of their knowledge had come from engagements with combined SalesForce / Mulesoft sales teams. During 2020, the demand for rapid digitisation of processes with low-code platforms further raised the profile of API usage.
Expectations for APIs are high. Meeting those expectations demands a structured approach to management of APIs, and the ability to report on their usage.
Who’s impacted
- CTO
- Software development teams
What’s Next?
Consider how the topic of APIs - which many executives see as critical for evolving business functions, or even a building block of digital transform efforts, needs to be communicated within the organisation. Explore how the adoption of low-code platforms both within and tangential to the ICT group will further expand the use of APIs. If not already available, put in place a roadmap for the introduction of API management capabilities, factoring both governance issues and supporting technologies.
Related IBRS Advisory
- Architectures for Mobilised Enterprise Applications
- Running IT-as-a-Service Part 15: Traditional enterprise architecture is irrelevant to digital transformation
- IBRSiQ: Can IBRS advise on the pros and cons of best of breed combined EAM/ERP vs fully integrated ERP/EAM?
- The impact of Software-as-a-Service on enterprise solutions: Why you must run IT-as-a-Service
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP) Part 2: Planning the ERP strategy for modernisation
- How to succeed with eforms Part 4: Selection framework
- Making the case for enterprise architecture
- Details
- IBRSAdvisory
The Latest
16 February 2021: Veeam continues to expand its footprint across the hyperscale Cloud vendors with the introduction of Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform. This follows its December 2020 announcement when Veeam announced the general availability of AWS v3 Backup and Azure v4 Backup. As a result, Veeam now provides backup and recover capabilities across - and just as importantly between - the three major hyperscale Cloud vendors.
Why it’s Important
During a briefing with IBRS, Veeam detailed its strong growth in the Asia Pacific region. It also discussed its strategy for providing backup and recovery capabilities over the major hyperscale Cloud services: Azure, AWS and Google. The demand for Cloud backup and recovery is growing with greater recognition organisations adopting hybrid Cloud (the most likely future state for many organisations) demands more consistent and consolidated approaches to management - including backup and migration of data between Clouds. VMWare is seeing growth in its hybrid Cloud management capabilities as well, and the synergy between Veeam and VMWare productions is no coincidence.
Who’s Impacted
- Cloud architects
- Business continuity teams
What’s Next?
Backing up Cloud resources appears to be a simple process. Taken on as service-by-service, this might be true. However, in reality the backup becomes increasingly challenging. As more and more applications are made up of a myriad of components, this leads to a rapidly evolving ecosystem of solutions. Hence, data recovery and restoration are also getting more complex. This is further exacerbated by the growing adoption of hybrid Cloud.
Organisations need to explore backup and recovery based on not only current state Cloud architecture, but possible migration between Cloud services and where different integrated applications reside on different Cloud platforms.
Related IBRS Advisory
- New generation IT service management tools Part 3: Multi-Cloud backup and recovery
- Sustaining efficiency gains demands architecture risks mitigation Part 2
- The journey to Office 365 Part 8: Is a third-party backup or archival solution needed?
- Details
- IBRSAdvisory
Conclusion:
While discussions regarding industry trends and customer priority shifts have remained prominent this month, vendor innovation in light of expected growth has also been a focus. In particular, managed service providers required to innovate beyond evolving technologies to include hybrid and integrated offering structures, effective business operations and external sources to support vendor growth. The need to access external sources for funding, skills, offerings and client base has become apparent. The demand for improved internal frameworks to allow for hybrid solutions, offering delivery and customer interactions has also been flagged. Accelerated activity in a critical and complex industry requires vendors to continue to provide high quality, innovative service provision frameworks in order to remain competitive.
- Details
- Irene Pimentel
Observations: In theory, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) technology enables organisations to be nimble, providing flexible, remote working and (for some use cases) more cost-effective deployment of digital workspaces. Recent events and technology advances have tested this theory and spawned several major changes. The rush to cater for remote working has increased adoption to Cloud-based VDI for ‘burst workloads’, at least in the short term. The need to quickly address scalability issues for organisations that had previously invested in VDI has favoured increased sales of hyperconverged solutions.
Longer term, organisations are looking to leverage VDI to enable compute and data-intensive tasks while keeping information ‘inside the data centre’. Some organisations – especially in financial services – are looking to expand previous VDI experiments to transform workplaces and service delivery models.
- Details
- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion: This month, discussions regarding expected industry trends in 2021 have been prominent. In particular, the growth of providers that support digital transformation projects and associated infrastructure, as well as security, Cloud services and automation tools. This growth is expected to be driven by industry shifts resulting from COVID-19 and the need to adapt to new operating environments and business processes. Vendors are preparing for heightened activity and expanding offerings to cater to customer needs. Customers will require integrated vendor services that respond to external issues, internal business changes, and the adoption of new technologies and frameworks to improve efficiencies.
- Details
- Irene Pimentel
The Latest
8 Dec 2020: Veeam announced the general availability of AWS v3 Backup. This is a timely endeavour with the continuous growth of multi-faceted Cloud apps built in AWS that necessitates backup and disaster recovery solutions.
Veeam offers automated backup and disaster recovery solutions that provide additional protection and management capabilities for Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS. There are two options to consider:
- Veeam Backup for AWS - protects data housed on AWS using its standalone AWS backup and recovery solution.
- Veeam Backup & Replication™ - safeguards and consolidates AWS backup and recovery with another Cloud, virtual or physical, across different Cloud platforms with unlimited data portability.
Why it’s Important
Cloud backups are no longer an option. Competition now requires additional redundancy and security for businesses. This ensures that their important data is available and retrievable if and when disasters strike.
Backing up Cloud resources appears to be a simple process. Taken on as service-by-service, this might be true. However, in reality the backup becomes increasingly challenging. As more and more applications are made up of a myriad of components, this leads to a rapidly evolving ecosystem of solutions. Hence, data recovery and restoration are also getting more complex.
Who’s Impacted
- Cloud architects
- Business continuity teams
What’s Next?
Tech management should explore which Cloud services, both IaaS and SaaS, need to be backed up. Establish strategies and choose the appropriate interplay between these services. For a growing Cloud usage or a forecast usage growth, evaluate how the services can be backed up reliably. This is possible through knowing beforehand the important parts that may be reconstructed into a recovered state if needed.
Related IBRS Advisory
- New generation IT service management tools Part 3: Multi-Cloud backup and recovery
- Sustaining efficiency gains demands architecture risks mitigation Part 2
- The journey to Office 365 Part 8: Is a third-party backup or archival solution needed?
- Details
- IBRSAdvisory
Conclusion: This month, discussions regarding managed service provider expansion plans, both locally and globally, have been prominent. A number of vendors are expanding bases and offerings, and acquiring skills in preparation for heightened customer demand across areas in the Asia-Pacific region, with a particular focus on digital transformation initiatives. The need for customers to transform and optimise operational frameworks as well as transition workloads has driven a range of mergers, acquisitions and site establishment projects in new markets. Customer demand for assistance with navigating and transitioning during difficult periods is high, but vendors must also prepare to accommodate shifts in buying behaviour resulting from the market growth which is expected to follow.
- Details
- Irene Pimentel