Enterprises across the globe have started reimagining their digital strategy to stay relevant to improve their market share. Digital strategies aim to leverage the use of cutting-edge technologies to transform the IT infrastructure and business applications. Many customers are actively evaluating new-age products and solutions to address their dynamic business requirements. To achieve speed, agility, and scalability requirements, customers are considering various cloud technologies. Thus, in the future, all business strategies would be digital strategies.

Traditionally, process IT strategy always involves determining the technologies to invest in, based on the current direction of the business. A digital strategy rather looks at activities and processes that require transformation to provide a better experience to customers and partners.

A digital strategy considers the right combination of technologies and strategies to create these experiences. Digital transformation which is a subset of digital strategy uses technologies to create or modify existing processes, cultures, and customer experiences to meet the changing business requirements. It usually focuses on the following four areas:

• Process transformation
• Business model transformation
• Domain transformation
• Cultural/organizational transformation

Customer’s challenges in cloud adoption and consumption

Since the last decade, customers have been adopting a cloud-first strategy instead of merely cloud adoption to migrate their compatible workloads to the cloud and modernize the legacy applications. Though this approach provided agility and scalability despite rigorous initial efforts, it resulted in migration being counter-productive for the organizations.

Here are some more challenges with a cloud-first approach:

• Cloud vendor lock-in
• Security, privacy, and compliance
• Governance and control
• Coherent multi-cloud adoption
• Less value for money
• Application compatibility on cloud
• Investment challenges for migration
• Identification of right tools, processes, and solutions

HCLTech’s Cloud Smart solution enables customers to accelerate their cloud transformation at the same time maximizing their business. Cloud Smart is the amalgamation of cloud-first and cloud-native approaches. It is coupled with deep-level automation and a robust partner ecosystem.

Figure 1: HCLTech Cloud Smart approach

HCLTech’s cloud ecosystem units help customers to adopt respective cloud services effectively. Cloud ecosystems also consult customers to help make the right choice of validated solution, validated toolset, process, and services at the same time learn how to judiciously consume the services over the period with continuous observability and control.

HCLTech’s Cloud Smart suite helps organizations to find the right fit solution to address the challenges while implementing digital transformation. The following table details the cloud smart levers corresponding to the respective digital transformation domains.

Digital transformation using HCLTech’s Cloud Smart

The cloud consulting team of HCLTech’s Cloud Smart helps customers decide a cloud adoption journey aligned to business strategy and objectives. Consultants evaluate the customer’s current IT landscape, processes and culture, business goals and strategy, and then come out with a balanced digital strategy which is a coalescence of cloud-native and cloud-first approaches.

We advise the right choice of cloud technologies for various workloads with a cost-balanced modernization strategy using standardized tools and processes. Agility, resiliency, and scalability are the factors considered while designing a robust digital transformation strategy to ensure that it is outcome-based and well-aligned to customer’s business goals and objectives.

• Skilled SRE, PRE engineers help customers to improve the end-to-end sustenance, reliability, and latency of the system by analyzing the root cause with the top-down approach. 
• Agile principles and scrum approach are advised to customers to deliver products in a short cycle enabling fast feedback, continual improvement, and rapid adaption to change.
• FinOps offering helps customers gain unified observability across multi-cloud. FinOps also provides continuous measurement of resource utilization that enables SRE/PREs to bring the resource utilization to an optimum level as well as reduce overall consumption costs by advising the teams to leverage cloud services smartly.

Cloud-native approach

As part of the cloud-native approach, HCLTech performs holistic cloud assessment across any enterprise environment based on the 6R approach. Assessment does not only include infrastructure but also detailed dependency mapping of applications, and more. Based on the 6R approach, applications and respective infrastructure is categorized into various move groups.

The assessment outcome clearly determines the list of applications that can be moved to the cloud seamlessly. There can also be a set of applications that need to be treated in terms of refactoring and more. For applications that need refactoring, HCLTech adopts a well-defined modernization process to modernize monolithic applications to microservices.

Customers can also leverage HCLTech’s cloud-native lab, exclusively built to simulate customer’s complex application modernization simulations and recommend customers the feasible migration path and detailed roadmap.

As part of the cloud modernization approach, some percentage of applications may need to be migrated on the lift-shift approach. These applications would leverage bare metal services across the public cloud that would enable customers to migrate and then allow modernization.

Many customers adopt the ‘migrate and modernize’ approach as many of them would like to exit from the current data center and move to a better service model to reduce the overall technical debt.

HCLTech’s internal IP tools and services (One Click Foundation, DPRISM, and more) can be leveraged while migrating the workload to the cloud. Multi-cloud container technology specialists like Anthos, Tanzeu, OpenShift can help customers to devise a strategy of application modernization and microservices design across multi-cloud coupled with end-to-end security.

Security across multi-cloud includes image scanning, secured authentication, layer 7 application security, compliance adherence, and more.

The operations and governance solution of Cloud Smart is coupled with AI Ops and Intelligent, Integrated Operations (IIOPS). IIOPS and AI Ops provide the ability not only to detect but also selfheal the problems that arise in a multi-cloud environment. IIOPS provides run book automation for quicker resolution of all infrastructure and application related issues. Thus, Cloud Smart offers a comprehensive solution to address all digital enterprise requirements.