Cloud is the mother of reinvention

Consider Enel, a leading European utility, looking to reinvent itself in the cloud. Using cost savings enabled by their migration to cloud starting in 2015, they have transformed their business. Today, ENEL enjoys reduced go-to-market times, optimized cost efficiency and greater business agility through use of public cloud. In addition, the cloud enabled its more than 37,000 employees to work remotely through secure collaboration and access to corporate applications.

RISE AND SHINE:
Harnessing the power of hyperscalers

The hyperscalers are on their own journeys of innovation, investing heavily in areas like streamlining migration, adapting services for private clouds and pushing out to the edge. In addition, they are investing in a variety of industry-specific cloud solutions to augment those provided by service providers and third-parties (e.g. HIPAA, PCI). For example, GE Healthcare is running its Health Cloud on Amazon AWS. Johnson Controls is employing Microsoft Azure’s IoT solution accelerators with its GLAS smart thermostat to give building owners remote access through web and mobile apps so that they can monitor and control features of the heating and cooling system. Also, Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine is leveraging Google Genomics to analyze hundreds of entire genomes in days and return query results in seconds while providing reliable security for DNA data.

The hyperscalers’ innovation also extends to sustainability. Here, they are incorporating innovative techniques to bring down energy consumption at data centers. The shift to hyperscale centers—massive cloud-based data centers run by large cloud providers in infrastructure-efficient spaces—has made sharing hardware resources and computing more energy-efficient. Increasing the use of renewable energy, such as deploying cooling servers with outside air and reusing residual heat, is also helping reduce emissions.

An enterprise needs to be ready and willing to leverage all this innovation. That’s where a Cloud Center of Excellence (see inset) can be critical, ensuring the organization keeps on top of the huge range of hyperscaler services and solutions released each year, understanding which will help the business (and which won’t) and working with application owners to facilitate adoption. For example, Microsoft Azure has recently launched a number of edge and IOT services, acquiring Telco related capabilities. Where a year ago little to no capability existed, it is now able to address some fairly complex edge-computing use cases.

For most organizations, the optimal way forward will be to select a primary hyperscaler for the majority of mission-critical workloads, and then work with one or more secondary providers dictated by the specific needs of the business (regulatory, industry, concentration risk, specialized workloads, commercial, etc.). This enables the organization to build core skills and experience on one platform before introducing a second. While it might seem tempting to work equally with several hyperscalers, arbitraging between them can be challenging. Arbitrage can not be the principal driver since whatever savings may be gained is offset by increased complexity and substantially greater skills requirements for multiple platforms. However, specialized functionality may justify the added investment.