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1 I D C T E C H N O L O G Y S P O T L I G H T Enabling a Diversified Cloud Strategy to Accelerate Innovation in the Future-Ready Enterprise December 2015 Adapted from Worldwide IDC Cloud FutureScape 2016: Mastering the Raw Material of Digital Transformation, by Robert P. Mahowald, Satoshi Matsumoto, Richard Villars, et al., IDC # Sponsored by Dell In today's digital economy, enterprises depend on the effective use of technology not just to support ongoing business processes, but also to drive new sources of competitive differentiation. For many enterprises, success or failure ties directly to the effectiveness of their IT service delivery environments. Most IT organziations and the datacenters that they run are optimized to support their companies systems of record. With the advent of the Internet and the mobile and big data analytics explosion, companies must now dedicate more IT resources and staff to the creation and continual development of systems of engagement, insight, and action that are external-facing and much larger in scale. Cloud is the foundation for this new agile business world. Only those organizations that improve their future readiness to fully use cloud, in all its diverse forms, will be able to capitalize on this transformation. Going forward, IT organizations must implement the right processes and practices to leverage diversified IT environments that encompass a range of deployment models (on-premises and off-premises) and a broad portfolio of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-aservice (IaaS) cloud environments. These future-ready organizations must have the ability to manage the selection, provisioning, and securing of distributed assets across multiple internal and external resources. They must also be able to implement hybrid/diversified IT operations and governance models that enable them to quickly bring to bear the assets, technology capabilities, and expertise of external managed service providers. Many of today s IT departments will struggle in this new role, and will increasingly look to service partners for the requisite support. This paper examines the shift to diversified cloud environments and the impact this shift will have on IT teams. It also looks at the role Dell plays in assisting organizations as they undertake this strategically important transition. The Accelerating Journey to Cloud IDC conducts in-depth research regarding current trends in cloud adoption, as well as makes predictions for future cloud use. Based on results from IDC's latest CloudView Survey, organizations expect more than 78% of IT resources to be delivered through some form of cloud model public, private, or a combination of the two in the next three years. By the end of 2017, over 80% of enterprise IT organizations will commit to coordinated use of multiple clouds, encompassing a diverse mix of public cloud services, as well as private clouds, community IDC 2031

2 clouds, hosted clouds and/or non-cloud infrastructure resources. More than 60% of enterprise-class businesses will subscribe to more than 10 different public cloud services by Twenty-five percent of public cloud services offered in 2015 will no longer be available in The availability of this spectrum of choice, and the uncertainty of an operable, dependable system of suppliers and capabilities, presents an enormous management challenge. For most IT organizations, hybrid simply "happens" as a consequence of past and current cloud and non-cloud IT investments. It doesn't represent a specific, prescribed architecture or optimal IT end state. Rather, it represents a transition point on a cloud maturity journey. Increasingly, the need to integrate traditional non-cloud systems with modern cloud infrastructure and cloud native applications will create friction and operational challenges across many IT organizations. The next three years can best be described as the time when future-ready companies shift their IT purchasing, provisioning, and management processes away from simply "having" a hybrid cloud to a diversified cloud and IT environment that is focused on service delivery and expenditures linked more closely to business outcomes. The dynamic fluctuations in public cloud supplier landscape, performance, and security requirements of individual applications, along with concerns about data sovereignty and regulatory compliance, will dictate which applications are deployed into public and private cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environments versus traditional IT environments. Information architectures that promote data sharing across multiple clouds and existing missioncritical enterprise applications is becoming a priority, yet these architectures must also support risk management strategies that can protect corporate interests in the event of public cloud service failures or data breaches. The industry adoption of OpenStack APIs and open source container management technologies such as Docker will make multi-cloud integration and workload portability more feasible than in the past, but these are not without their own challenges when it comes to ensuring consistent operations. The imperative is for an overarching management regime that allows automated, policy-based access to all required IT resources, no matter the location. Cloud Becomes a Spring Board to Better Data Use Consumers and enterprises want increased access to new data sources, and cloud solutions provide a practical mechanism for distributing that data more easily and to a wider audience. In addition, consumers of that data will also have access to some level of analysis converting that data to actionable information. The effective use of cloud (both on-premises and in service provider facilities) will play a critical role enabling the effective use of big data analytics. Cloud-based infrastructure enables organizations to: Reduce the burden of private infrastructure needed to interact with data, and shifts concentration of efforts from scaling data access and data movement, to refining and extending analytics Increase the value of data assets through improved data life-cycle management and broader data availability Drive improved financial results by more rapidly exploiting combinations of internal and external data sources to alter business outcomes Accelerate organizational transformation required to shift to a digital business model Decrease the cost in time and resources of taking business risks 2015 IDC 2

3 Preparing Your IT Organization for the Next Stage of the Cloud Journey As organizations' applications leverage cloud-based infrastructure and data resources residing in public, private, and hybrid clouds, management processes and operational priorities must move beyond the deployment of simple self-service infrastructure provisioning portals to promoting investment in end-to-end application performance and availability management, capacity optimization, and IT operations analytics tools. Seamless workload portability and automated migration will allow IT teams to quickly extend or relocate applications and workloads in the event of infrastructure failures or changing business conditions. IT organizations must implement unified cloud service management platforms that link all cloudbased application performance monitoring, IT operations analytics, and infrastructure control systems to business impact dashboards and policy-based orchestration engines. With cloud environments expanding to encompass a broad variety of legacy and cloud native applications, IT decision makers must put a premium on processes and tools that can simplify operations, maintain end-to-end service levels, and ensure that resources adapt seamlessly to dynamic changes in workload, processing, storage, and network requirements. IT leadership teams, in conjunction with business and application stakeholders, need to review, and update as needed, data and information management policies, data protection, and risk management protocols to ensure appropriate compliance and governance of sensitive data across both cloud and non-cloud platforms. The impact of this shift includes: Transitioning internal datacenter-based IT assets to services-oriented capabilities abstracted from asset ownership and physical hardware Evolving the role of the IT department to a service-oriented model, as opposed to traditional functional roles that are technology oriented. This means providing liaisons to business and application teams, as well as increasing degrees of co-management along with third-party service providers In response IT organizations must: Implement a consistent management, security, and governance framework for IT environments featuring diversified and distributed IT assets, capabilities, and service providers Develop and continuously refine best practices for cloud portfolio composition, including service offerings, partner selection, governance, and performance while minimizing dependence on a specific third-party skill sets to enable flexibility, should shifts in partners or providers be required Seek partners that can act as digital transformation partners offering cloud and hosted services with a range of resource tenancy and management options, as well as transition assistance related to financing, network rationalization, and integration across diverse IT environments In this new cloud world, organizational makeup, business alignment, and skills matrices become a strategic planning matter that involves more than the IT organization. In-house IT organizations must evolve and become influential enablers to the business. They will be advocates for change, both technical and cultural, required to drive business alignment and transformation. They must become managers of a portfolio of services, and be able to measure consumption and benefit of the cloud services they provide. Considering Dell for Hybrid Cloud Solutions and Services Future-ready cloud products and services with flexible consumption models. Dell offers a full range of customer-centric options for deploying private/hybrid cloud from custom/diy 2015 IDC 3

4 leveraging Dell's portfolio of servers, storage, networking, software and services, to flexible reference architectures based on best practices, to engineered solutions that reduce time to value and streamline implementation. Flexible modular building block approach offers choice and lays the foundation for the future-ready datacenter. Solutions enable IT to adapt and add new technologies as cloud evolves. Dell s open, standards-based platforms are designed for seamless integration into the major private cloud ecosystems Microsoft, VMware, and Red Hat OpenStack. This approach allows customers to build from their platform of choice or to advance their existing virtualization environment to provide on-premises cloud capabilities with a fast path to hybrid and multi-cloud integration enabling cloud implementation on their terms. Visibility, governance, and control for multi-cloud environments. Dell Cloud Manager is a unified interface for management, control, and visibility of hybrid and multi-cloud environments. DCM provides automation and insight into heterogeneous cloud services and applications, whether provisioned on-premises as a private cloud resource or off-premises from a public cloud. DCM integrates with internal systems to maintain compliance and governance, and also enables access and cost controls across multiple internal and external clouds allowing selection of services based on business specifications, service levels, and duration. Portability of applications and data. Dell Boomi is an on-demand multi-tenant cloud integration platform that connects any combination of cloud and on-premises applications and data. It uses an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to enable creation and integration processes, simplifying the merger of data from multiple sources. A community-powered mapping suggestion engine automatically suggests mappings between data fields and applications. Heterogeneous platform integration, cloud automation, and management for multi-cloud environments. Active System Manager has built-in integration with Microsoft System Center and VMware vrealize to extend virtualization automation and orchestration capabilities to the infrastructure and application layer. It supports heterogeneous physical infrastructure and multiple hypervisors for simplified resource pooling, application templating, and rapid provisioning with a drastic reduction in manual steps. ASM can apply business logic to private cloud systems management and offers a centralized approach to application and environment-specific configuration, and dynamic resource allocation designed to automate IT service delivery. By capturing best practices into service templates, ASM ensures reliable and repeatable infrastructure and application provisioning. Performance insights and tuning, scalability, and resource availability. Foglight Suite is a heterogeneous suite of software that provides management, utilization reporting, and performance monitoring for infrastructure and applications in physical and virtual systems, all in a unified dashboard. It provides visibility from the end user through to underlying hardware layers, supporting cross-domain collaboration and reducing the time it takes to solve problems. Consulting, design, implementation and a range of services for cloud. Dell s cloud consulting services can assist organizations in visualizing a cloud strategy as well as planning, designing and implementing an efficient, flexible cloud solution. Dell s consulting services team helps organizations navigate critical IT service delivery elements such as multi-cloud integration, application rationalization and migration, creation of self-service portals and business workflows, automation and orchestration to ensure that the cloud implementation is aligned with the desired outcomes. Dell Services also provides managed services and hosted private cloud IDC 4

5 Challenges Both hardware and software vendors will face stiff new competition from industry cloud providers. While the need for their software isn't necessarily going to diminish, the purchasing power of their customers is likely to converge exponentially. As a result, a hardware provider that has historically sold to hundreds of entities may soon face a situation where buying decisions for hybrid cloud deployments are divided between customers undertaking on-premises cloud projects and their partners operating an off-premises cloud. Software vendors' experience with industry clouds will likely be similar. Those companies with solutions that are best suited for cloud deployment (easily scalable, multitenant design, simple standards-based integration, etc.) in each industry will be best positioned for selection to power customer private/hybrid clouds as well as new industry clouds. Conclusion Organizations must make "cloud-first" the mantra for enterprise IT. Organizations can t wait for their vendors to decide which cloud is best for them. This requires organizations to embrace the integration and management of diverse sets of environments; it will be a fundamental requirement for operating not just as an IT group, but as a business. The effective management of resources and data across cloud architectures requires clearly articulated IT service definitions and policies, including standard configurations, service catalog definition and maintenance, security, and governance to ensure consistent service delivery and service levels regardless of the infrastructure resources supporting the application. IT teams need to evaluate the current use of automation, orchestration, and cloud standards and identify gaps so they can be filled quickly. Finally, IT teams in collaboration with business leaders must develop policies and process modifications to enable a consumption model for IT services. They must implement proof-of-concept test beds for automated self-service provisioning, cloud service performance and cost reporting and analytics, and life-cycle management spanning applications and middleware, as well as infrastructure across hybrid cloud architectures in order to complete production deployments. A B O U T T H I S P U B L I C A T I ON This publication was produced by IDC Custom Solutions. The opinion, analysis, and research results presented herein are drawn from more detailed research and analysis independently conducted and published by IDC, unless specific vendor sponsorship is noted. IDC Custom Solutions makes IDC content available in a wide range of formats for distribution by various companies. A license to distribute IDC content does not imply endorsement of or opinion about the licensee. C O P Y R I G H T A N D R E S T R I C T I O N S Any IDC information or reference to IDC that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from IDC. For permission requests contact the Custom Solutions information line at or gms@idc.com. Translation and/or localization of this document require an additional license from IDC. For more information on IDC visit For more information on IDC Custom Solutions visit Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F IDC 5