Cloud maturity models for excellence and efficiency

 

Cloud maturity models

Global business leaders ask their teams, “Are we using the cloud effectively?” “Are we spending too much on cloud computing?” is a common concern. Managing cloud cost is a valid concern—82% of 2023 Statista poll respondents named it as a major difficulty.

Security, governance, and resource and skill shortages also top respondents’ concerns. Cloud maturity models can help organisations overcome these concerns, establish their cloud strategy, and confidently utilise the cloud.

Macro and service-level cloud maturity models (CMMs) assess an organization’s cloud adoption readiness. They evaluate how well an organisation uses cloud services and resources and how to increase security and efficiency.

Cloud migration: why?

Real-time analytics, microservices, and APIs, which benefit from cloud computing’s flexibility and scalability, are pressuring organisations to transition to the cloud. Cloud skills and maturity are crucial to digital transformation, and cloud adoption has huge potential. According to a Deloitte report, 99% of cloud leaders consider the cloud as the foundation of their digital strategy. McKinsey sees a USD 3 trillion opportunity.

Comprehensive cloud maturity assessment is needed for a successful approach. This assessment determines what measures the organisation has to take to fully realise cloud benefitscloud benefits and identify current limitations, such as upgrading legacy tech and altering workflows. This assessment works well with Cloud maturity models.

Organisations must choose a Cloud maturity model that suits their needs from numerous. Many organisations start with a three-phase cloud maturity evaluation employing cloud adoption, cloud securitycloud security, and cloud-native models.

Cloud adoption maturity model

This approach measures an organization’s cloud maturity overall. It assesses an organization’s technology, internal knowledge, culture, DevOps team, cloud migration initiatives, and more. An organisation must complete one step before moving on because these stages are linear.

• Legacy: Early adopters lack cloud-ready applications, workloads, services, and infrastructure.
• Ad hoc: Next is ad hoc maturity, which likely means the organisation has started using cloud technologies like IaaS, the lowest-level cloud resource control. IaaS users pay-as-you-go for computing, network, and storage services on-demand over the internet.
• Repeatable: Companies have increased cloud spending at this point. This may entail creating a Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) and assessing initial cloud investments’ scalability. Most crucially, the company has automated app, workstream, and data cloud migration.
• Optimised: Cloud environments perform efficiently and every new use case follows the organization’s basis.
• Advanced cloud: Most of the company’s workstreams are now cloud-based. Everything functions smoothly and stakeholders know the cloud can drive company goals.

Cloud security maturity model

Any company moving to the cloud must optimise security. With strong rules and postures, cloud providers may make the cloud more secure than on-premises data centres. Prioritising cloud security is critical because public cloud breaches can take months to fix and have major financial and reputational ramifications.

Cloud service providers (CSPs)

Cloud service providers (CSPs) and clients partner on security. Clients building on cloud infrastructure can bring misconfigurations or other vulnerabilities, but CSPs certify their security. CSPs and clients must collaborate to secure environments.

IBM is a member of the Cloud Security Alliance, which has a popular cloud security maturity model. Organisations aiming to improve cloud security can use the approach.

The full model may not be necessary for organisations, but they can use its components. Five steps focus on the organization’s security automation.

• No automation: Security personnel manually find and fix issues using dashboards.
• Simple SecOps comprises infrastructure-as-code (IaC) deployments and account federation.
• More federation and multi-factor authentication (MFA) are added in this phase, although most automation is still done manually.
• Guardrails: It expands the automation library into numerous account guardrails, cloud governance regulations.
• Automation everywhere: Everything is integrated into IaC and MFA, and federation is widespread.

Cloud native maturity models

The cloud-native maturity model (CNMM) assesses an organization’s capacity to build cloud-native apps and workloads, while the first two maturity models assess preparedness. Cloud leaders support cloud-native development 87% of the time, says Deloitte.

Before using this model, corporate executives should understand their aims, like with other models. The organization’s maturity level will depend on these goals. Business executives must also evaluate their enterprise apps to determine the best cloud migration plan.

Most “lifted and shifted” apps can run in the cloud but may not benefit fully. Cloud-matured companies generally choose cloud-native apps for their most crucial tools and services.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation proposed a model

• Level 1: Build: An organisation is pre-producing a proof of concept (POC) application with limited organisational assistance. Business leaders comprehend cloud native’s benefits, and team members have basic technological knowledge despite being new.
• Level 2: Teams engage in training and new skills, and SMEs emerge. Developing a DevOps approach brings together cloud engineers and developers. This organisational transformation creates new teams, agile project groups, and feedback and testing loops.
• Level 3: Scale: Cloud-native strategy is desired. Stakeholder buy-in, competency, and cloud-native focus are expanding. The company is implementing shift-left regulations and training all personnel on security. This level has strong centralization and clear roles, although bottlenecks might down the process.
• Level 4: Improve: All services use the cloud. Leadership and the team prioritise cloud cost optimisation. The organisation seeks ways to improve and streamline procedures. Self-service tools are pushing cloud expertise from developers to all employees. Multiple groups use Kubernetes to deliver and manage containerised apps. A solid base allows decentralisation to begin.
• Level 5: Optimize: The business trusts the IT team and all employees are aware of the cloud-native environment. Self-sufficient teams own services. DevOps and DevSecOps are skilled, operational, and scalable. Teams are comfortable experimenting and using data to make business decisions. Accurate data procedures improve optimisation and enable FinOps adoption. The company has a versatile foundation, easy operations, and met original targets.

What benefits my company?

The benefits and extent of a cloud migration depend on an organization’s cloud maturity level. Not every organisation will or wants to reach the top maturity level in all three models. Gartner predicts that 70% of workloads will be in the cloud by 2024, making it likely that organisations would struggle to compete without cloud maturity.

The cloud benefits an organisation as its cloud infrastructure, security, and cloud-native application posture mature. An organisation can maximise cloud benefits and efficiency by assessing current cloud capabilities and developing a maturity strategy.

Using IBM to advance cloud maturity

Using IBM Instana Observability, organisations may achieve cloud maturity and ensure smooth application and infrastructure transfer during the planning, migration, and execution phases. Instana helps organisations mature cloud environments and processes by creating performance baselines, right-sizing infrastructure, finding bottlenecks, and monitoring end-user experience.

Digital transformation requires more than transferring apps, infrastructure, and services to the cloud. To discover possible issues that could affect cloud resources and application performance, organisations require a rigorous cloud monitoring strategy that tracks key performance metrics including response time, resource utilisation, and error rates.

Instana gives complete, real-time cloud environment visibility. IT teams may proactively monitor and manage AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform cloud resources.

The IBM Turbonomic platform optimises compute, storage, and network resources across stacks to reduce overprovisioning and boost ROI. The Turbonomic platform’s AI-powered automation can reduce costs and maintain performance with automatic, ongoing cloud optimisation for cloud-first, hybrid, and multicloud strategies.