Chapter 23: Six Levels of Cloud Maturity
Chapter 15.
The awareness and knowledge about the cloud has grown significantly in the last several years. It wasn’t that long ago that “using the cloud” was something progressive organizations considered doing, or something that startups looking to reduce capital costs in infrastructure utilized.
But it did not take long for the enterprise to realize the value of the cloud. In the last few years, the mainstream acceptance of the cloud by all but the most conservative enterprises is now mostly mainstream. Or at least, the desire to adopt the cloud is now mostly mainstream.
For many enterprises, though, finding success in the cloud is still a daunting challenge. Too often, organizations set overly high expectations for the benefits of migrating to the cloud while underestimating the amount of work required in the migration itself and the impact the migration has on the culture of their company. An unfortunate result can be a vicious cycle of blame, finger pointing, and grasping for something—anything—that could be considered a victory.
When they find it, organizations may decide they’ve had enough and stop the migration process before they can take full advantage of the cloud. But by putting off real reform, they won’t realize the cost and innovation benefits that drove the cloud migration project in the first place. As migration costs balloon and promised features, functionalities, and applications fail to materialize, companies can end up seeing the cloud as little more than an expensive boondoggle.
Why did this happen? Often, the biggest error comes from thinking about the cloud in the wrong way. Often, enterprise management think of a cloud migration as a simple “lift-and-shift” operation—simply move existing applications that are running in their own data centers directly to the cloud, with as few changes as possible..
However, real cloud success, at scale, requires much more than lift-and-shift. It demands successfully navigating the world of the dynamic cloud. The dynamic cloud doesn’t just facilitate application scaling, it makes the process faster and easier. It also helps development teams respond to changes faster, and implement these changes more quickly. That’s not a luxury—it’s a necessity to ensure the availability of modern applications that exhibit extreme scaling needs and extremely spiky performance. When you don’t know when your customers will use your application, it’s hard to predict your static infrastructure needs. A dynamic infrastructure is required to meet the needs of these modern applications without wasting significant resources.
Using the dynamic cloud, however, takes a higher level of commitment to using your cloud resources effectively than does a simple lift-and-shift.
That’s because after a migration, the type of application and infrastructure visibility required changes. Many resources become dynamic, so keeping track of what resources are important for what purposes also becomes dynamic. Additionally, applications now run on an infrastructure outside of a team’s direct control, a concept that is foreign to many large enterprises.
Fortunately, becoming proficient in the dynamic cloud does not have to be scary or dangerous. Adopting the cloud can be done safely and effectively, but is a continual learning experience. Organizations must be willing to learn and adapt cloud offerings to match their needs and expectations with the reality of what the cloud can provide.
Critically, you can’t expect to get there all at once. There are six basic maturity levels that organizations go through during their cloud adoption process:
Experimenting: What is the cloud?
Securing the cloud: Can we trust the cloud?
Enabling servers and SaaS: Lift-and-shift, confirmation the cloud works pretty well
Enabling value added services: Dynamic cloud becomes a practice
Enabling unique services: Dynamic cloud is deeply ingrained in the culture
Mandating cloud usage: Why do we need our own data centers?
To be successful in moving to the cloud, it is important to realize that this continuum of cloud maturity exists and to understand the implications for an organization’s actions and processes. Moving from one level of maturity to the next isn’t always easy, it isn’t always fast, and the specific details differ for every organization. Also, organizations sometimes settle on a level fo cloud maturity that’s right for their culture that’s short the the end goal. That’s okay, if that meets the expectations and requirements of your business.
What are the six levels of cloud maturity? Here they are from lowest maturity to highest maturity.
Level 1: Experimenting with the cloud
This first, tentative step into the cloud relies on safe technologies—technologies that apply in simple ways to applications and parts of applications that are typically less mission critical.
Level 1 involves using the cloud for a single, simple piece of an application to test how cloud services work. Often, the first service used is a storage solution such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), because it’s easy to store some things in the cloud and avoid addressing the complex processes and systems needed for cloud based computation, such as cloud based servers and serverless computation.
This level usually starts as a one-off experiment, where one or more teams conduct stand-alone migrations. No cloud policies are created at this point; instead it’s all about figuring out exactly what the cloud is.
Level 2: Securing the cloud
Level 2 is a critical evolution point in an organization’s cloud culture, as it begins to involve disciplines throughout the company—legal, finance, security, and so on.
This is when policies on how the cloud can be used within a company begin to be formed. The precise nature of these guidelines, from formal policies to ad-hoc “company culture” understandings, don’t matter that much. What’s important is that the entire company is involved and all stakeholders have input.
Level 3: Using servers and applications in the cloud
The third stage of cloud maturity comes when an organization begins to replace on-premise servers and other backend resources. These are still simple lift-and-shift applications, with a basic philosophy of “Let’s just move an application to the cloud and see what happens.”
At this level, the goal is to understand how the cloud works for an entire application. This is where the organization begins to enjoy actual advantages from using the cloud, such as reduced cost and increased flexibility.
Enterprises need to be careful here, however. Level 3 can be a danger point. If enterprises attempt to determine the value of using the cloud to run their applications at this stage, they may find they’re bearing the costs of the cloud without enjoying the corresponding benefits. That can cause companies to give up and regard their entire cloud effort as a failure.
Level 4: Enabling value-added managed services
Here is where some of the inherent value of the cloud begins to appear. At this level, organizations stat to look at cloud managed services, such as managed databases. Services such as Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Aurora, and Microsoft Azure SQL managed databases provide database capabilities to applications while requiring less overall management. Rather, you let the cloud provider manage the database. They may also look at services such as Amazon Elasticsearch, Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) to provide managed computation.
As the dynamic cloud starts taking effect here, the cloud’s biggest benefits kick in. This is also when companies commit to using the cloud for at least some of their strategic applications and services.
Level 5: Enabling cloud-unique services
Once a company becomes a cloud-enabled organization, it can look to leverage high-value, cloud-specific services. Uniquely available in the cloud, these services are designed specifically for the dynamic cloud. Some examples of services utilized at this level include serverless computing such as AWS Lambda or Microsoft Azure Functions, highly scalable databases such as Amazon DynamoDB, and other generalized services, such as Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS).
At Level 5, the concept of dynamic cloud becomes embedded in an organization’s application development and management processes. Use of these services also begins to tie the enterprise to specific cloud providers. While many cloud providers offer serverless capabilities, each one does so in a slightly different manner. As organizations begin to use these higher-value, cloud-unique services, they not only become tied to the cloud, but also to specific cloud providers.
Level 6: Cloud All In
This is the ultimate maturity level of cloud adoption. At this top most level, organizations begin to require use of the cloud for all new applications and begin to require existing applications to be migrated to the cloud. The usual end goal for customers at this level is to get rid entirely of their own corporate data centers, rather depend on the cloud for all infrastructure needs.
This level is especially common in cloud-native companies, where the needs of legacy applications complicate the ability to be all in on the cloud. It’s significantly easier for cloud-native companies to mandate all-cloud, based applications. More established enterprises may choose to retain their legacy data centers. However, more and more traditional enterprises are taking the cloud plunge and abandoning the business of managing their own data centers.
Organization vs Application Maturity Level
The six cloud computing maturity levels apply to individual applications, organizations, or entire enterprises. But the cloud maturity level of a particular application may be higher or lower than that of the organization as a whole.
For example, early candidates for cloud migration include internal applications, because they present less risk of negatively impacting customers and the business itself. In fact, an internal application may jump to Level 6.
Larger, more complex legacy enterprise applications may be significantly slower in their cloud adoption strategy.
Meanwhile, the overall enterprise itself may still sit at Level 1, or 2 or 3, and never make it to Level 6.
This is entirely normal and expected, and demonstrates the complexities of cloud adoption in large enterprise organizations.