We all think that there are 3 possible stages on your journey to the cloud

Those companies, digital starters, looking for advisory to start moving some workloads to the public cloud from their on premise or private cloud infrastructure. Those companies, called digital expanders, with some experience already on the public cloud and satisfied with the outcome of a first cloud adoption on those projects. Finally, those digital leaders, maybe native or not on the public cloud, but with important investment on OPEX and very focus on the business motivations and the outcomes to be cloud first in almost all they do.

But what happens if we change our perception?..if we think there is a conservative IT profile, a moderate IT profile or even an aggressive one in terms on how to leverage cloud native technologies ?

On one hand, another factor to be evaluated it’s not just how to prepare the cloud adoption with methodologies like CAF. But also to understand that not all the companies need a Data Analytics platform or an IoT solution. At least, during the coming years..

On the other hand, how can you reflect those cloud flavours and the cloud native technologies on the real world?..well we can start with this full picture that came to my head sometime ago..

Depending on your IT profile you will be working on some of these cloud flavours

This picture (based on Microsoft Azure approach) try to represent that there are several technologies that we can group by cloud strategy and associate with an IT profile.

A conservative IT Profile – Would be a company mostly base in traditional infrastructure with storage, backup or archiving as most important priorities as well as some VMs or LOB applications. A sector like banks and finance institutions are well represented here. Actors like hardware providers are still supporting on their on prem and private cloud platforms. Also, they have a big investment on leader hypervisors, complex computing technologies, and use some scalability with containers and autoscale sets but limited for their own resources. User Experience and usability on their APPs is not a strong point and automation on processes with RPA, or use modern Devops platforms is also not very extended on those companies. They have lots of legacy applications and monolithic databases, old data warehouse and traditional ERPs.

A moderate IT Profile – Would be a company which is more focus on providing an APP or an ecommerce platform with almost no downtime and escalation based on seasonal products. Maybe even they are migrating some specific workloads to bring innovation, to work on a global way with other subsidiaries or to leverage the potential of some disruptive solution like bots to improve the User Experience for their customers. The hardware almost disappear in this kind of companies. They have a hybrid model solution and are starting to embrace the disruption on new cloud native solutions like are cognitive services, machine learning or data analytics. -They are even integrating SaaS technologies like Docusign, use the marketplace to replace some thirty party products that before were present on the previous on premise data center, they had. An example of this profile can be retail companies offering a new online shopping experience, etc.

An aggressive IT Profile – Be cloud first. All they want is working on the public cloud when possible as they learned a lot on the benefits and the outcomes when they CAF and the progressive migration of workloads are well-architected and well defined. They have a tremendous knowledge on leveraging disruptive technologies, save cost, provide the right governance and security and achieve their goals. These companies are very dynamic, use agile methodologies, have clear priorities on accelerate the daily processes, the business and improve the employees and customers experiences. Innovation is their mantra. Here you will see startups like fintech, healthtech,etc. You will see the enterprise vertical on renewable energy companies, insurance or in the chemical and pharmaceutical industry. They use data analytics and Big Data massively, ML, PaaS and Serverless and modern devops platforms. They reduce investment on hardware and licenses as well as integrate SaaS, block chains and other technologies in the daily user experience. Also, they provide APPs and remote work to their users.

To summarize, this post just try to show that there, outside, adopting the cloud, each company, each public institution have their own hat and they can tailor the technologies to their needs. Finally, not all the companies of each vertical or business are fit with these descriptions but without stereotyping, it is a way of defining types of companies that will soon or later make use of the benefits of the public cloud.

See you then in the next post…