Increasingly, decisions about tools — and sometimes platforms — are made by AppDev teams with the blessing of line-of-business (LOB) stakeholders, without IT involvement. This pushes oversight away from IT leaders and can strain IT team more.
At the same time, improving client, employee, and partner experience — a major driver for many enterprises — often requires the use of data and AI, plus moving more workloads to cloud. But the more data used to improve experiences, the higher the risk that that information will be compromised, in turn increasing the risk of reputational damage. As a result, many business leaders believe that cloud is relatively insecure.
But using a DevSecOps-led approach is more secure than many traditional methods of development/delivery, says Duvvur.
Additionally, in fact, to overcome the skills shortage and technical risks and adopt a new approach to cloud transition, companies are increasingly relying on managed service providers (MSPs). Research reported in the “2021 Flexera State of the Cloud Report” found that nearly three-quarters (74%) of the survey respondents using cloud plan to harness an MSP such as Kyndryl to help reduce management complexity.
Multicloud deployments also bring with them different SLAs that vary among providers as well as financial and accounting considerations that must be monitored and measured across the varied landscape. Add in a growing mix of integration and data management requirements across the multicloud hybrid landscape, and IT organizations are facing a whole new world where traditional skills and operating principles don’t translate.
“Companies underestimate the complexity of modernizing their mission-critical applications that are brittle, with upstream and downstream connectivity to mainframes or other core systems that are highly sensitive to outages,” says Duvvur. “Often they are replatforming into cloud without the help of an experienced systems integrator that can drive end-to-end transformation, from consulting all the way through deployment, migration, optimization, and management — that entire spectrum.”
Organizations are increasingly looking to innovate their business models to serve existing clients better and go after new clients for growth. With technology advancing at breakneck speeds and in light of increasing security threats, organizations are open to partnerships and as-a-service models that span infrastructure, platforms, software, and operations. The right partner can plug the gaps for unique and hard-to-find skill sets in areas such as AI, microservices, or DevSecOps, helping position companies for an era of data-driven business. At the same time, an end-to-end services provider has established processes and methodologies along with industry experience to help define the current state and target future state design, accelerating digital transformation and giving companies an edge over competitors stuck in first-generation cloud environments.
To minimize complexity and take pain out of the cloud migration journey, companies need to align with a partner that takes a life cycle approach to cloud modernization and application deployment.
Most customers are looking for a partner that is well versed in the complexity but also has automation and IP wrapped around it to tame the complexity and help them navigate through the morass to achieve their end state goals.
