Get the most from the hyperscalers
Most enterprises will choose to work with at least one of the public cloud hyperscalers,
such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Alibaba or Google Cloud. They’ll look to
leverage these providers’ global scale, deep expertise, and numerous cloud services.
Getting the most out of a hyperscaler is about committing to a partnership. Enterprises are
investing in a relationship that will last years into the future. What’s more, hyperscalers
will often be willing to put their own money on the table to kick-start that relationship.
This can be a critical boost to a digital transformation, especially where financing is an
issue, helping to smooth the investment curve associated with getting the move to cloud
started. But it’s important not to fixate on cost alone. The enterprise also needs to
carefully consider the support it will get from the hyperscaler around innovation, industry
solutions, digital transformation and engineering, not only during the initial migraton but
looking ahead and seeing where opportunities to exploit higher level services may exist.
An expert team elevates your business: 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.
Read more +
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. While it might seem
tempting to work equally with several hyperscalers, arbitraging between them can be
challenging. Arbitrage can't 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.
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Maximizing value through a Cloud Center of Excellence
By providing a single focal point for both the business and IT, a Cloud Center of
Excellence (COE)—a small team of cross-functional experts—can significantly
accelerate cloud adoption and the value realized from it. The COE brings central governance
and direction to cloud architecture and design choices, helping manage the complexities of
distributed and multi-cloud solutions and preventing the confusion that can ensue if each
part of the business decides to go its own way.
What’s more, with centralized expertise in hyperscaler solutions, the COE is better able to
keep track of the constant stream of new services released to the market. That means the COE
can drive the enterprise innovation agenda forward, helping the organization increase its
cloud maturity.
The COE also has a critical internal “marketing” function, working with application owners
to explain how to leverage new hyperscaler capabilities for their benefit (whether that’s
cost savings, faster development or new customer-centered capabilities).