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11/10/2024Blog by Dominic Melly, Group Head of Cloud, Ultima
In 2023 we released our first Ultima Business Guide to Cloud, giving customers a perspective on the cloud infrastructure world for the year ahead and what Ultima are doing to support customers to adopt Cloud strategies effectively, how to avoid common pit falls and most importantly how to accelerate success
Well, it’s been over a year and its about time to see how things have developed and evolved
In 2023 we highlighted three key challenges to cloud adoption:
- Managing cloud spend
- Security
- Lack of cloud experience
As noted in our most recent UiQ Edition 7 this has proven not only true of the last year, but very much remains true for the projected future. The surveys all say the two biggest challenges to cloud adoption for the next few years is cost and skills.
Is security not such a focus anymore?
Well that’s the thing, it is, but I believe that we’re seeing it move from a separate “skill” or technical area into being foundational to everything that we do. In the wake of the Covid pandemic there was the well published rush to the cloud, and Microsoft noted early on then that whilst they’re very happy to help (of course) that they wanted partners to push security as often the mad rush wasn’t supported by the most detailed project plan and security fell to the wayside. What we’ve seen since then is a concerted effort to secure the online borders as it were, and as a result the security scene has greatly matured, and is more intrinsically part of everything, and not something you can really loop back and sort out at a later date.
In all, the focus we’ve all put into security as paid dividends in consumer outlook as confidence that deployments and workloads will be built and managed securely appears high.
Changing Approaches
Challenges covered, what about how we saw behaviors and approaches panning out? We predicted
- Fewer wholesale migration projects where apps and workloads are lifted and shifted
- Greater emphasis on modernization
- More awareness of importance of governance, cost allocation and cost control
Time makes fools of us all it seems, although here its less “time” and more “Broadcom”…
Interestingly, it looks a lot like the drive to modernization over fresh adoption is cyclical. Where 2023 had a clear uptick in modernization into the cloud, a new wave of organisations is firing up the lift and shift. Nothing happens in isolation of course, and the Broadcom VMWare acquisition is the ready culprit for this somewhat against the grain trend. VMWare licencing changes have been THE driving force for technical change this year, and its forced a huge volume of lift and shift migrations, and driven the adoption of the Azure VMWare service as a commitment free halfway house whilst you modernize away from VMWare technologies.
On the Hybrid front the big driver has been Microsoft Extended Security Updates. We’ve seen little adoption of Azure Arc for the value of Arcs own capabilities and ease of managing hybrid resources, but we’ve seen it adopted readily and with gusto to extend the lifetime of legacy on premise workloads running on end of life operating systems and versions of SQL.
So two of three predictions have been spoiled by other actors, what about number 3?
Well, FinOps has grown legs and is now a major part of enterprise cloud operations. Cloud Cost Management has never been easy, observability tools have struggled with usability and providing sufficient perceived value in of their own right however now tied to an approach championed and led by a global body in the FinOps Foundation (being tied to the Linux Foundation hardly hurt) and now we have a globally agreed, vendor agnostic best practice framework for the intersection of cost visibility, governance, agility and control.
How we can help?
As the cloud landscape has changed and evolved so have our cloud services. We’ve retained our focus on quality and supporting our customers making the best of their investments, and we’ve reinforced this by bringing in new skills, new automation and new services – for customers struggling with costs we’ve introduced our FinOps and Cost Optimisation Assessments. For clients looking to augment their teams our Managed Cloud services have been revitalized and for customers who are looking for stop gap or permanent skills our Resource and Talent As A Service gives vetted and preapproved colleagues on a temporary or permanent basis. Ask your friendly Ultima Expert for more