Whether they are new to the cloud arena or wish to migrate existing workloads to the cloud, or are already in the cloud and wish to re-architect their solutions to be cloud-first, or if they have business concepts and wish to translate this into the most effective revenue earner by building on all of the previous incarnations of the cloud to formulate a XaaS value stream, to deliver a high Return on Investment (ROI), for most startups fetching in the region of 17.5% with potential for exponential growth.
At Lean Accelerate we focus our attention on directing clients on the three cloud pathways, each of these can be seen as a building block for the previous generation, this is most relevant for a large business entity that wishes to move from on-premises to the cloud, in turn for them to apply Cloud First to refine their solutions once they are comfortable with the cloud-native, and with sufficient market research and drive, to develop a high revenue stream model using XaaS as a conduit to deliver their business model. These Cloud Pathways are -
Startups, on the other hand, may not have any legacy technology and wish to go straight to XaaS, driving the business model through constant refinement through a close-knit customer feedback loop, in terms of expanding / refining functionality, value and support.
There are several driving factors for businesses migrating from on-premises technology stacks to the cloud, such as cost reduction, business agility and rapidness to market are a few. In order to achieve a business case should be prepared, TCO and ROI calculated, training considerations, migrations strategies considered along with tooling, KPI’s and more. Key touchpoints -
The strategic vision for adopting the cloud is likely to be underpinned by strong business drivers such as cost reduction, increased business agility, improved security and availability, or preparedness for rapid growth.
A cloud-first strategy allows businesses to save money on software, platforms, and infrastructure. Instead of building their own tech stack, they subscribe to a cloud service provider who can provide managed services at a cheaper cost. The business that wants to adopt a cloud-first mindset should understand the difference between the two because cloud-only practices are often counterproductive.
The service provider takes advantage of the economies of scale, and businesses get access to high-value services at a reduced cost. A cloud-only mentality enforces cloud computing solutions on any and all enterprise operations. Many businesses that claim to be cloud-first are actually promoting cloud-only practices. The difference is more in thought process than application, cloud-only is a mandate while cloud-first is a suggested routine.
While the cloud can handle a lot of tasks, many businesses still rely on on-premise hardware or software to perform various functions. Switching all those functions to the cloud may be more cost-efficient, but they can sometimes be less productive. Choosing to adopt a cloud solution or not, should be considered on a case by case basis rather than strictly forced.
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST (2011) issued a report, while this doesn't use the XaaS acronym, it establishes the as-a-Service pattern with its three primary service models of cloud computing, which are IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.
XaaS is the proliferation of these concepts where X stands for anything or everything. The drivers for this in terms of adopting the cloud for workloads benefit from lower operational costs, no upfront capital investments, simpler access to up-to-date technology, faster implementation, and ability to extend beyond the software model, and to integrate with IoT as recently seen with Rolls-Royce using XaaS solution monitoring their jet engines using IoT sensors as reported by Forbes (2018).
The success of the XaaS model is simple to understand in these three steps -
By following these iterative steps where the customer is always first, this delivers value and quality to the customer. It also offers the potential for exponential growth. The average growth figures reported for XaaS startups is 17.5% ARR.
Depending on which of the Cloud Pathways you choose, will influence which Onboarding Strategy you chose, there will be similarities across each of the pathways, let’s dive deeper.
Lean Accelerate Client Onboarding Strategy Matrix | ||||
Phase | Tasks | Cloud Migration | Cloud First | XaaS |
Introduction | Introduction meeting on who we are, and what we can offer. | |||
Mutually reciprocal Non-Disclosure Agreement signed. | ||||
Demo system to highlight existing capability. | ||||
Pre-engagement Analysis Engagement Analysis | Meet cloud leadership and elicit business goals. | |||
Based on the leadership goals a scope definition is formulated from the business goals and technology strategy. | ||||
Pre-engagement Terms of the Business contract signed. | ||||
Workshops are broken into six areas to createan action plan designed to move your team from cloud goals to cloud implementation. | ||||
Asset discovery and cost current state. | ||||
Map the proposed system to the right sized model and cost future state. | ||||
Preliminary concept viability assessment. | ||||
Evaluate Return on Investment. | ||||
Evaluate Total Cost of Ownership. | ||||
Formulate a user subscription model. | ||||
Formulate growth plan KPI’s. | ||||
Formulate a 3 year financial model for growth, costs and Annual Recurring Revenue. | ||||
Formulate a geo-location data compliance model. | ||||
Formulate business case and align technology strategy with business goals. | ||||
Present business case. | ||||
Sign off on the business case. | ||||
Statement of Works. | ||||
Project Terms of the Business contract signed. | ||||
Design | Solution design to delivery technology strategy. | |||
Design simplification mapping on-premises to cloud or to cloud higher value services. E.G. On-Premises server mapped to AWS EC2 or to AWS Fargate or AWS Lambda. | ||||
Identify a simple workflow to migrate to the cloud. | ||||
Formulate KPI’s for application performance. | ||||
Chose a migration strategy. | ||||
Sign off on business solution. | ||||
Delivery | Create a technical design. | |||
Commence PoC in fortnightly iterative cycles. | ||||
Benchmark system to meet all quality checks. | ||||
Demonstrate the value of cloud migration based on business value KPI’s. | ||||
Engage monitor and improve. | ||||
Upskilling and knowledge transfer. | ||||
Sign off on delivered solution. | ||||
Post Delivery | Cost analysis reviews. | |||
24 / 7 support. | ||||
Well architected system reviews keeping in line with trends. |
In order to understand if a proposed cloud solution is viable or not in terms of return on investment, we need to consider several cost and growth factors so to provide an accurate financial model. Here are some tools that can help with this process.
This calculator compares the cost of your applications in an on-premises or traditional hosting environment to AWS. Get an instant summary report which shows the three year TCO comparison by cost categories. Here is a link to AWS TCO Calculator.
Discover IT assets across your application portfolio, identify dependencies and requirements, and build your comprehensive migration plan with this technology suite. Available on AWS Marketplace via AMI. One such product is CloudScape.
Based on data from Discovery, the product provides an analysis of TCO for running customer workloads on AWS and comparisons of the TCO with the cost of continuing the workloads on-premises. The product automatically determines target resource types and sizes through source-to-target resource mapping and right-sizing with the lowest cost possible. Available on AWS Marketplace via AMI. One such product is Turbonomic.
AWS Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data into and out of AWS.
AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) helps you migrate databases to AWS easily and securely. The source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on the database. The AWS Database Migration Service can migrate your data to and from the most widely used commercial and open-source databases.
Azure Database Migration Service is designed as a seamless, end-to-end solution for moving on-premises SQL Server databases to the cloud.
VMware Cloud on AWS solution that makes it easy for customers to run VMware workloads on the AWS Cloud. Customers can use VMware’s virtualization and management software to seamlessly deploy and manage VMware workloads across all of their on-premises and AWS environments.
AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) is an agentless service which makes it easier and faster for you to migrate thousands of on-premises workloads to AWS.
AWS CloudEndure Migration is an automated rehost (lift-and-shift) solution for migrating workloads to AWS.
Azure Migrate a central hub for starting, executing and tracking your Azure migration.
GCP Migrate for Compute Engine Fast, flexible, and safe migration to Google Cloud.
GCP Migrating from Compute Engine to GKE for containerised VMs.
The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps you review the state of your workloads and compares them to the latest AWS architecture best practices. The tool is based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework, developed to help cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient application infrastructure. This tool can be found here.
The Cloud Pathway chosen by business needs some formal thought leadership to ensure the business outcomes are married up the strategy for delivery of the technology model. In turn, this can be mapped into various cloud streams, depending on the organisation's current structure, be it a startup with no legacy, then why not go for XaaS, or if an existing business with legacy technology and they want to open up their internal work process to their global partner baes, then again, XaaS may serve as the right cloud pathway. By partnering with Lean Accelerate Consultancy we can help clarify and quantify these cloud pathways dilemmas, and our client onboarding process helps to streamline the strategy for achieving this.
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