IT services and data across a multi-cloud and edge ecosystem are the raw ingredients for business innovation. This innovation is sparked by insights that are derived from accessible data (in batch and real-time), and by the people and change agents who build, deploy, and manage applications and experiences. In addition to pure innovation, organizations are looking for true value, as they strive to get the most out of their existing investments, assets, and vendor licensing commitments.
On September 28th, 2021, HPE unveiled the Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework (E2CAF). The framework enables organizations to transform and sustain a scalable operating model and achieve their digital ambitions. It is comprised of 8 functional domains and describes the enterprise capabilities that support and enrich teams, practice areas, joint IT operations, and strategic readiness across the organization.
Let’s take a moment to address some frequently asked questions associated with the HPE Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework, and how it fuels an operating model that optimizes innovation and engagement at the digital edge.
What exactly is the framework, and how does it work?
The framework consists of 8 domains: Strategy & Governance, Innovation, People, Applications, DevOps, Data, Security, and Operations. We have noticed that our customers have been focusing their efforts across these 8 major pillars in their journey, and we organized our framework around topics that resonate in the field. Each of these domains is further broken down into sub-domains, then capabilities, and features. The edge-to-cloud adoption framework is the foundation to develop an actionable cloud adoption or transformation strategy and roadmap that is tailored for each customer. It is broken down into the following hierarchy ...
Domains
Domains are the highest level in the framework, and describe the functional practices that drive areas such as governance, information security, and product & service delivery. The 8 domains in the framework are as follows (click on any domain to see a short video about it):
Subdomains
Subdomains (shown below each domain) decompose each domain into discrete functional areas for ease of management and coordination.
Capabilities
Capabilities describe what an organization or system does and can do. Capabilities are typically produced and maintained by one or more practice areas. For example, here is a list of capabilities within the Strategy & Governance > Economics subdomain:
- TCO/ROI
- Chargeback & Showback
- Cost Avoidance & Reduction
- Budget Allocation & Management
Features
Features are the measurable services that mature and distinguish enterprise capabilities. Features are typically produced by a single practice area. Over time, and as additional features are introduced, a capability is enriched and matured to satisfy business needs. For example, here is a list of capabilities within the Strategy & Governance > Economics > Cost Avoidance & Reduction capability:
- Naming & Tagging Structure
- Enterprise Standards for Application & Service Archetypes
- Cost Optimization Policies
- Autoscaling
- Rightsizing of Compute & Storage Instances
- Cost Management Monitoring & Alerting
- Cost-Optimized Hosting Regions (within a single provider)
- Cost-Optimized Cloud Providers (across multiple providers)
Related Content: HPE Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework (video)
Most cloud players have an adoption framework. How is this different from any other adoption framework out there?
There are various frameworks out there that focus on implementing certain tools or technologies. A lot of them focus specifically on how to adopt a specific set of capabilities from a particular technology vendor. Even though we have our own products and services, we realized pretty early on that organizations will have technology capabilities, applications, and data spread across multiple clouds on-prem, in a co-lo and at the edge. The edge can be a remote office, factory floor, autonomous vehicle or the international space station. We focused our effort on business goals and outcomes as opposed to technology. The goal of our framework is to help enterprises mature their capabilities across the entire enterprise, including both technical and critical non-technical IT practices such as the PMO, Risk, Privacy, Audit, HR, Learning & Development, and Communications.
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Many of my applications and workloads still reside on premises. Will this framework still work for me?
Yes – 100%. With the framework as a backdrop for IT advisory services, HPE can quickly determine an organization’s readiness and ability to achieve their goals and objectives and provide a detailed and actionable roadmap for transformation execution. The comprehensive framework supports the Internet of Things (IOT), Hybrid- and Multi-Cloud, and Data Center ecosystems alike.
Closer to home, HPE ’s GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform is our answer to deliver “cloud experience” everywhere. We are helping customers realize benefits and value from their IT by delivering it as-a-service with cloud capabilities right at their fingertips. And in order to do that, we are helping our customers modernize and improve their capabilities across a number of domains. Our Edge-to-Cloud TransformationAdoption Framework serves as a map on this journey and allows us to stay focused on how our HPE GreenLake suite of servicesplatform can help customers achieve their digital agendas. As we identify our customers’ needs and expected outcomes, we can objectively advise them on the best course of action and where GL HPE GreenLake cloud services can address those needs.
Related Content: HPE GreenLake Edge-to-Cloud Platform (video)
I’m not interested in pursuing an enterprise-wide transformation at this time. How does this framework help me with the strategic objectives that I am specifically responsible for?
HPE leverages a combination of an organization’s functional, operational, and strategic readiness plus a collection of objective characteristics to produce a bespoke approach for each of our clients. The decomposability of the framework enables clients to address immediate needs with fast time to value, and the added benefit of having a deep understanding of what good looks like over the long haul. Below you will find three examples of domain focus to support the goals of – 1) improving product service and quality, 2) optimizing operational costs (TCO), and 3) reducing time to market.
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What is the value proposition to the customer?
The differentiated value proposition is our expertise, objective and extensible approach, and significant experience. Anyone can do anything on their own, provided they have enough time and money. The most important thing to do is to identify the right catalyst to move faster. OurThe HPE Pointnext Services Advisory and Professional Services team has done hundreds of cloud transformation and implementation engagements, including work for some of the largest, most prestigious organizations in the world. (See: What is Pointnext?) We converted that experience into this framework, which can help you realize value faster, save costs, and increase agility.
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How does a customer typically get started?
There are a couple of answers to this. First, we can help customers figure out where they are and where they want to go. We have a set of offerings from 1- & 3-day workshops to a very comprehensive engagement evaluating organizations’ current hybrid cloud capabilities and operating model and helping them create a strategy and chart a course to their desired level of maturity. These engagements help our customers focus on their digital agendas and define a prescriptive path to value.
Second, we are quickly moving to a very advisory-led and consultative approach and use our framework as a map in our selling motions to engage the customers at the right level. It’s almost working from outside-in. For example, a customer might have a key need in a specific area or have a specific digital agenda in mind (for example, reduce time to value). We can map those agendas to various domains/sub-domains and capabilities and help our customers address those.
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What are some of the main obstacles a customer might face?
Any transformation is only successful if people are willing to embark on the journey. The major challenges we see are around strategic alignment and people/culture change. Technology itself is not complicated, but quite often there’s no consensus on the strategy and vision. Companies might say “we want to be cloud-first,” but they are not fully aligned on what that means. Cloud-first doesn’t mean simply using cloud tech. It means changing the way you operate.
And that brings us to people. Change is hard, and you must take your people on this journey. You have to show them how they fit into the new operating model, how they contribute to delivering value to the organization after the transformation. That’s why our framework doesn’t just focus on technology but rather looks at other areas – strategy, people, and innovation among them.
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Do you have any case studies of clients using the framework to achieve their digital ambitions?
Case Study #1 – Energy Sector
CLIENT: One of the largest integrated energy companies in North America
HOW IT STARTED: Company decided to adopt public cloud to increase agility and maintain technology leadership position. However, they quickly realized that as good as the public cloud is, agility requires a different operating model across the enterprise. Being nimble and delivering value is not simply about moving apps to the public cloud.
HOW WE USED THE FRAMEWORK: The customer brought our experts to establish an interdisciplinary team to help guide the transformation strategy and govern the journey. They used the framework to align several key components:
- Strategy: What are we trying to achieve? Where is the value coming from and how do we get there? And that meant focusing on business outcomes.
- Applications: Where should their applications live in order to get the most benefits? What should be modernized, migrated, and discontinued?
- Operations: The goal was to increase agility, improve visibility, and enable better outcomes. It was never about moving things from on-prem to public cloud just for the sake of it. We helped them identify the desired capabilities and assisted them on the implementation.
A nice benefit of the framework is that it has several areas that help enterprises think through the capabilities they need in order to satisfy business needs and achieve strategic objectives within the IT space.
By the way, right now the customer is in 3 different public clouds and 3 data centers. We focused on what’s right for them, and that happened to span, literally, edge-to-cloud. That’s the power of the framework.
So, the customer used their cloud journey and digital transformation to become a new and better organization characterized as: people-focused, data-informed, and technology-enabled.
Case Study #2 – Health Care & Social Assistance Sector
CLIENT: One of the largest hospitals in the United States
HOW IT STARTED: The client initially looked at public cloud to augment on-premises capabilities and enhance the services they offered to healthcare professionals in more rapid fashion than the traditional capabilities could provide. Their infrastructure and applications team wanted to push for more cloud capabilities faster, while security and compliance were rightfully concerned about appropriate regulations and data protection. The right answer was to provide similar cloud-like capabilities on-prem.
HOW WE USED THE FRAMEWORK: We brought our experience to the customer and used the framework to focus on the following elements:
- Organizational Structure – As part of the overall need for governance, we set up a hybrid cloud business office that drove the vision and implementation of cloud initiatives that aligned with the broader corporate strategy
- Operating Model – We helped establish a new operating model and supporting technology so that the developers can quickly experiment on the public cloud and then apply those results to run production securely in their own environment. We helped migrate the on-prem IT environment into as-a-service to align costs with the usage.
- Data Analytics Capabilities – Researchers need to run advanced analytics on data, but patient privacy cannot be compromised, so we have built sophisticated AI capabilities for the customer in their datacenter. Now their data scientists can train models and run predictions with the best cyber security controls around them.
In this example, it was a perfect combination of public cloud and on-prem environments delivering cloud capabilities and outcomes to the customer for the right reasons. Public cloud has helped them get into a different operating model, and they have applied those learnings to on-prem environments to have “cloud everywhere.” Technology was important, but it’s the combination of people, process, and tech that ultimately delivers value.
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- Transforming Healthcare at Texas Children's Hospital
- HPE is Helping Canterbury Health Board Embrace the Cloud to Help Patients
What distinguishes an edge-to-cloud operating model from a traditional operating model?
A traditional operating model is foundational, as it describes the blueprint for how people, process, and technology drive business value for an organization. An edge-to-cloud operating model is an extension to a traditional model, in that it describes how organizations sustain business value by using technology and data to bridge the digital and physical worlds. You can consider the traditional model as the core, with the edge-to-cloud model representing the additional focus areas for success.
Below is a side-by-side comparison of some categorized focus areas across the two models. As organizations mature, they place themselves in a better position to thrive at the edge. Without an operationalized set of core capabilities that can be scaled, organizations will encounter challenges and obstacles to reaching their full potential at the edge.
| Traditional Operating Model | Edge-to-Cloud Operating Model | |
| People | Talent Acquisition & Enablement | Skills & Proficiencies Centering on Hyper-Automation, Service Reliability, Application Performance, and Networking |
| Process | Automation & Orchestration | Data Curation & Prioritization |
| Technology | API-driven Distributed Architecture | High Performance Compute & Storage at the point of Production & Consumption |
| Strategy | Risk Reduction & Cost Management | Adopting New Business & Engagement Models |
| Enterprise Policy | Risk Mgmt. and Sustained Continuous Compliance via Automated Violation Detection & Remediation | Data Residency & Sovereignty |
| Financial Mgmt. | Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) & Return on Investment (ROI) | Networking & Communication Costs of Backhaul and Data Transfer |
| Performance Mgmt. | KPIs & Metrics to Drive Accountability | Resiliency, Availability, and Business Continuity |
| User Experience (UX) | Automate Critical Processes and Create Self-Service Options | Eliminate Latency (sub 10ms) and Produce Rich Service Catalog at the Service Edge |
Related Content: Greetings from the Edge
The Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework is a hallmark of HPE's leading approach to delivering, operating, and innovating at the edge.
To learn more, check out this blog by Keith White, SVP and GM of HPE GreenLake Cloud Services Commercial Business Group:
Accelerating Adoption of Cloud-Everywhere Operating Models with the Industry’s Most Proven Methodologies
To learn more about the HPE Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework, visit:
www.hpe.com/greenlake/cloud-adoption-framework
Cloud_Steve
Steven Fatigante is a Director of Delivery with over 27 years of experience delivering technology strategy and business solutions. Steven is a driven leader with a solid background in building information technology strategies that focus on digital transformation, security controls and compliance, flexible and extensible architectures, and reliability for both heavily-regulated and growth-oriented companies. He leverages entrepreneurial skills to accomplish desired outcomes by implementing business-focused best practices to achieve corporate goals in alignment with bottom-line impact. Steven has a knack for making strategic implementations and execution feel tactical and practical.
