According to research from McKinsey, only 16% of digital transformation efforts have successfully improved performance and equipped the organizations to sustain changes in the long term. That’s a shockingly low number. Why is this happening? And how can you prevent this from derailing your own digital transformation journey and putting your business models, revenue, and profitability at risk?
Getting from here to the cloud—it’s complicated
You can’t talk about digital transformation without talking about the cloud. In fact, the cloud is considered to be the critical foundation for digital transformation and all its promised benefits. But typical large enterprises have made large and long investments in their infrastructures and so have hundreds or even thousands of critical applications and services that are currently on-premises. Digital transformation—which by all accounts just about every business is in the process of pursuing in one form or another—demands that some portion of these workloads be moved to the cloud. But another study from McKinsey found that 60% of organizations surveyed have migrated less than 10% of their workloads. One-tenth may create some incremental changes, but it’s hardly likely to enable true transformation. Clearly, there’s a problem.
Is it a journey or a destination?
That’s a bit of a trick question. Let’s take it in parts.
As a destination, there’s no such thing as THE cloud. There are public clouds and private clouds. There’s hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. There’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). In short, it can be complicated.
In terms of the journey, while cloud providers offer tools to help migrate on-premises workloads, they are often incomplete. That leaves you to create your own scripts and spreadsheets to manage the process. And, it’s not a one-time event. In reality, the effort is repeated as more and more workloads are migrated.
You have to get both right, but that’s just the start. You can’t forget what happens after migration. This critical part of the story—the part where the cloud is meant to be doing its transformational thing—is too often glossed over. You’ve got to manage and optimize all those in-the-cloud resources and that’s a whole new ballgame because the cloud, whichever version you’re in, is a fundamentally different infrastructure from on-premises. Your existing tools don’t give you the specific visibility and capabilities you need. There are plenty of point solutions and cloud-provider tools you can add to your stack, but they don’t replace your current tool set, which you still need because you’ll keep some percentage of your workloads on-premises for a variety of reasons. So now you’ve completely bifurcated your cloud and on-premises deployments—which is compounded if you use multiple public cloud providers. The resulting siloed tools, teams, and processes create complexity, eroding your agility and driving up costs. This is the exact opposite of what the cloud was supposed to deliver in the first place. The very infrastructure that was supposed to enable your transformation is now standing in its way.
It’s not just the cloud itself—it’s also what’s IN the cloud (and not)
The cloud in its various forms gets all the attention, but really that’s just your infrastructure. It’s your workloads that are providing the direct business value. So when all your processes and tools are focused on the cloud—in other words, when they’re deployment-model-specific—they’re missing the point.
Instead, you need take a workload-centric approach to migrating and then managing and optimizing capacity, costs, and performance of your entire estate in a unified way regardless of location. In fact, in a recent report on tips for avoiding common mistakes, Gartner advises companies to align their cloud strategy with their data center strategy, noting that “cloud strategy decisions are workload by workload.” The only way you can make workload-by-workload strategy decisions, let alone ongoing optimization adjustments, is to understand both the details of your mission-critical workloads and the details of the environment they run in. Virtana has deep experience on both sides of that equation. Virtana Infrastructure Performance Management provides high-fidelity baseline data about your mission-critical workloads running in your private cloud, and Virtana Cloud Cost Management enables multi-cloud rightsizing and cost optimization. And now we’re bringing it all together into a unified hybrid cloud optimization platform.
Accelerate your transformation
Your digital transformation journey can only be as successful as your cloud journey and how you manage and optimize your workloads across public, private, and hybrid/multi-cloud environments. Virtana can help you do just that. With the Virtana platform, you can migrate, manage, optimize, and validate your mission-critical workloads—positioning you to accelerate your digital transformation efforts, control costs, and improve application availability on an ongoing basis.
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Scott Leatherman
