How to design, build and migrate to an enterprise cloud: 5 steps to success

[ServicesExperts]

Enterprise cloud environments can deliver solid benefits. Here’s a high-level view of this cloud strategy, a look at how some enterprises tackled it, and how HPE Pointnext Services can help.

by Kentaro Sekimoto, Chief Solution Architect in HPE's Cloud Native Computing Practice Area, HPE Pointnext Advisory & Professional Services

Many enterprise companies are starting to integrate and use on-premises private and public clouds. Especially in recent years, in Asia, many financial companies that had previously been prohibited by their governments from using the public cloud have now been allowed to build private or hybrid clouds. HPE Pointnext Services has provided these companies with a variety of services to help them design, build, and operate secure hybrid clouds.

What is an enterprise cloud?

It’s a hybrid cloud environment that supports a mix of traditional and cloud-native technologies while providing the advanced security, highly stable operations, and designed flexibility and agility that enterprises need.

For example, repairing a data breach can be very costly and can negatively impact a company’s reputation and customer relationships. These are serious issues for enterprise companies. The enterprise cloud can prevent such problems.

Figure 1: Features of enterprise cloud

To list some features and benefits:

1. Security

A big part of creating an enterprise cloud is to give organizations access to security tools such as “single pane of glass” monitoring across the hybrid cloud landscape; automated scanning of all code for security flaws; automated penetration testing for everything from virtual machines to virtual networks; and advanced artificial intelligence for attack monitoring. By using AI technologies for security, faster results are produced and more fine-gained controls are obtained.

2. Business resiliency

Without a solid disaster recovery solution, the business's resilience is at risk in the face of outages, natural disasters, or cyberattacks. Loss of revenue, loss of customer confidence, and even bankruptcy are possible consequences. There are easy-to-use disaster recovery options available; for example, backup/replication services from on-premises to cloud and multiple regions in cloud.  

3. Innovation

Enterprise cloud provides several innovative features, such as on-demand computing, serverless computing and more. On-demand computing gives enterprise companies the flexibility to dynamically increase or decrease resource consumption as needed. This minimizes the upfront costs associated with launching new products and testing new services and removes barriers to innovation.

Serverless computing is a cloud-native development model that allows developers to build and run applications without having to manage servers. It provides automatic scaling, built-in high availability, and a pay-per-use billing model to increase agility and optimize costs.

4. Cost reduction

Typical enterprise cloud solutions rely on pay-as-you-go, so enterprise companies pay only for the resources they use. IT costs for enterprise cloud are often lower, easier to calculate, and easier to predict.

The process for enterprise cloud migration

How do you build an enterprise cloud?

The important thing is to learn and follow best practices. Generally, the steps to move to the cloud are classified into Learn and Align; Assess; Plan; Migrate; and Operate.

Figure 2: Typical steps for enterprise cloud migration

1. Learn and Align is the stage to address knowledge gaps and define the foundational components for successfully building and operating a hybrid cloud. These components include a strategy for how the cloud is going to be utilized; changes to financial operations when using the cloud, defining the operations model for supporting the cloud, ensuring compliance across the hybrid cloud; and transforming to use a DevOps methodology. These are critical to achieving organizational alignment and creating a clear vision for the hybrid cloud.

2. Assess. After alignment has been achieved and knowledge gaps have been addressed, the next step in the cloud journey is to grasp the current state, envision the future state, and design the architecture; this allows for the creation of the migration plan. Start the current-state investigation by taking the existing CMDB and creating a list of hardware and software that make up the existing applications.

3. Plan. Next, a deep-dive application assessment needs to be performed on each application. This enables the classification of the applications into migration waves, creating the migration plan.

4. Migrate. The work of migrating application workloads to the cloud begins with building the destination cloud environment. In general, a large-scale cloud environment can’t be built suddenly; in a large company, it is built gradually, by assembling the parts of the future completed form. This destination cloud environment is called the Cloud Landing Zone, and it is important for cloud designers to refer to recommended starting-point best practices, such as cloud default accounts, account structure, network, and security layout.

5. Operate. After the workload is migrated to the cloud, day-to-day operations will begin. You will monitor the operation of application workloads and cloud infrastructure services on the cloud. Also, you need to provide security monitoring against threats such as illegal access. And you’ll need to control the optimization of daily operation costs.

How these 3 enterprises successfully adopted enterprise cloud

1. A global comprehensive electronic device manufacturer in Japan wanted to accelerate digital transformation, and decided to integrate communication platforms across all global subsidiaries to improve the work environment for communication, document sharing, meetings and team collaboration.

HPE Pointnext Services designed and built a group-wide, hybrid cloud-based integrated collaboration platform. One of the customer’s expectations was to establish a secure global collaboration platform with a high level of IT governance on the public cloud by leveraging, for example:

• Azure Information Protection to detect, classify, and protect documents and emails
• Identity management aggregation and synchronization
• Firewall protection, which should be the same as in the on-premises data center.

Figure 3: Secure global collaboration platform for a global manufacturer in Japan

2. One of the largest conglomerates in Taiwan develops integrated products tailored to the needs of its customers and integrates the resources of all its subsidiaries in all aspects so that customers can enjoy "one-stop shopping" services.

HPE Pointnext Services provided consulting services related to cloud adoption and transformation initiatives, established standard guides for security, risk, and compliance; assessed the maturity of hybrid cloud organizations; and assessed application assets.

HPE Pointnext Services built one Minimum Viable Cloud (MVC) for the migration of applications for first and early adopters.

The customer’s expectations were:

• Development of a hybrid security and compliance reference architecture that meets Taiwan's current compliance standards, using the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) framework and best practices as guidelines.
• Infrastructure utility optimization: this provides capacity flexibility by saving costs and reducing long-term capitalized infrastructure costs.
• Maintaining trust: Leverage the latest architectures and techniques deployed in geographically dispersed and stable infrastructures to mitigate risk.
• Responsibility for creating a high-level migration roadmap.

Figure 4: Minimum Viable Cloud (MVC) for hybrid cloud environment of a conglomerate in Taiwan

3. Korea's leading financial services company – which offers a variety of services such as banking, cards and investments – was considering a hybrid cloud as a next-generation service platform. The company chose HPE Pointnext Services to leverage our expertise in public, private, and traditional IT-wide cloud transformation, and to implement the right combination of cloud transformation strategies and workloads.

The customer’s expectations were:

• Compliance with regulations for adopting cloud services
• Better governance and operational excellence
• Phased cloud transformation roadmap – right-mix approaches for various kinds of applications and rationalized IT cost.

Figure 5: Assessment and roadmap of cloud transformation for a financial company in Korea

HPE Pointnext Services: A guide for your enterprise cloud journey

HPE Pointnext Services continues to develop innovative services to help our customers achieve the benefits of cloud for the enterprise:

HPE Transformation Program for Cloud solution

This service leverages a proven Cloud Transformation Maturity (CTM) framework to analyze the maturity of your cloud, identify gaps between what is and what should be, and create a roadmap for establishing a mature cloud environment. We help you establish a Cloud Business Office (CBO). And we provide workshops to help you define the operation model according to your unique purpose.

HPE Economic Analysis for Cloud

This service provides a comprehensive comparative financial analysis between current IT assets and future-state cloud-based environments. TCO analysis compares the operating costs of an on-premises IT footprint and the equivalent cloud footprint. The ROI analysis is built on the TCO analysis and estimates the one-time migration cost and when you will get a positive return.

Application Migration Plan for Cloud (HPE Right Mix Advisor)

This service uses a combination of industry-standard tools and HPE-specific IP to calculate cloud endpoints and metrics for determining migration strategies for each targeted application, and to create a high-level roadmap for cloud migration of applications.

HPE Cloud-Native Software Development service

Through a proven cloud-native software development approach, this service works with your development team to develop your specific application, determine the appropriate application architecture and cloud infrastructure, and use an agile approach to software solutions. At the same time as building the solution, we provide cloud-native best practices.

HPE GreenLake Management Services

This service monitors, operates and optimizes your infrastructure and applications, from the core to the edge to the cloud, in order to detect and resolve problems and continuously improve your infrastructure.

DevOps Training and Certifications

This service provides a roadmap for moving from the current DevOps capabilities to the final state based on the desired results. It offers an evaluation of current assessments and status of DevOps practices; industry best practice recommendations, including DevOps security; and frameworks and roadmaps through workshops.

Figure 6: Services from HPE Pointnext Services

HPE Pointnext Services provides its customers with IT services that leverage the experience and IP that we have accumulated through hundreds of successful enterprise-centric cloud transformation engagements. Learn more about technology services consulting from HPE Pointnext Services.

Kentaro Sekimoto is a Chief Solution Architect in HPE's Cloud Native Computing Practice Area, HPE Pointnext Advisory & Professional Services. He started his career as a mechanical engineer in 1988 and has since worked on a variety of computer technologies, desktop/server/storage software development, private/public cloud solutions and cloud-native technologies. In recent years, he has been working on various hybrid cloud projects in Asian countries.

Services Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

twitter.com/HPE_Pointnext
linkedin.com/showcase/hpe-pointnext-services/
hpe.com/pointnext