While cloud adoption is a s­mart choice, the entire process and journey should be backed up by an intelligent strategy that can fully leverage the benefits of cloud adoption. This blog explains the why, what, and how of the HCLTech Cloud Smart strategy.

Why HCLTech Cloud Smart?

Every successful organization is a software company in today’s world, be it a startup or a decade-old enterprise. The cloud-first approach has been one of the strongest pillars of digital transformation, directly impacting Business 4.0 and Industry 4.0. In today’s world and during this unprecedented time, if an enterprise has not started its journey to cloud yet, it is highly likely that the enterprise will always be slow to respond to business and market needs.

The biggest challenge of the cloud-first approach was the thought process that moving to cloud can reduce cost and IT expenses, but it was never true. Cost reduction is one of the benefits of cloud, but not the primary one. Its primary purpose is to give a kickstart to businesses. It all started with IaaS and then matured to PaaS, SaaS, CaaS, FaaS, etc. Similarly, the cloud-native approach also came with its own sets of challenges, such as the lack of skills, digital immaturity, and the complexity of a wide range of products available on the CNCF landscape (only 15 graduated projects out of 1669).

One can reap the benefits of cloud-only by adopting a cloud smart strategy which is not limited by the goal of cost optimization alone but also extends to the right transformation choices of IT infrastructure, applications, skill sets, operating model, security, governance, observability, data management, etc.

What is HCLTech Cloud Smart?

Picking the right cloud solutions, product, and platform is even more complex now, considering the variety and the plethora of options available with CSPs, such as AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. As of this year, approximately 17,300 products and services were offered on Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace alone. This becomes more complicated with the increase in numbers of CSPs and with a multi-cloud approach.

The HCLTech Cloud Smart strategy is all about making the right and intelligent choice while adopting cloud. It focuses on maximizing the benefits of the cloud-first and the cloud-native approaches by implementing multi-level RAID (risk, assessment, issue, and dependency) analysis and methodology.

HCLTech Cloud Smart takes care of the entire lifecycle of a greenfield or a brownfield cloud deployment, from on-prem to private cloud to public cloud, right from discovery to decommissioning. To succeed in a business transformation journey, the HCLTech Cloud Smart strategy enables every organization to make the right choice, at the right time. The HCLTech Cloud Smart approach ensures proper incubation of the appropriate elements – product, people, process, and platform – to get the best out of the cloud investment with guaranteed ROI and minimum TCO. Here are the key functions of HCLTech Cloud Smart:

• HCLTech Cloud Smart picks the best cloud hosting option among private, hybrid, public cloud, and multi-cloud based on business needs and objectives.
• HCLTech Cloud Smart picks and recommends the right cloud type and technologies for your workloads based on the priorities of cost, time to market, pricing model and flexibility, data residency, multi-cloud network, compliance, and security.
• HCLTech Cloud Smart evaluates how the organization has to evolve in a phased approach with a target operating model and team transformation.
• HCLTech Cloud Smart helps in choosing the right strategy among Re-host (lift and shift) with IaaS or Re-build with PaaS, SaaS, CaaS, FaaS, etc.
• HCLTech Cloud Smart selects the business-case driven R-Lane approach (Re-host, Re-platform, Re-Factor, Re-Architect, Retain, or Retire)
• HCLTech Cloud Smart incubates AIOps to entire IT operations of infrastructure and applications with built-in capabilities of AI/ML-based auto resolutions.
• HCLTech Cloud Smart is about FinOps with real-time and predictive monitoring of cloud expenses for both private and public cloud
• HCLTech Cloud Smart offers an integrated observability platform, acting as a single source of truth.
• HCLTech Cloud Smart helps choose the right product and platform for database (SQL, NoSQL), data model (key-value, document, graph), data analytics (Kafka, Redis), data warehouse, etc.
• HCLTech Cloud Smart helps right-size workloads and optimizes license and infrastructure with the rinse-and-repeat methodology.

How to optimize HCLTech Cloud Smart?

The ‘how-to’ part of the HCLTech Cloud Smart strategy is the trickiest. It emphasizes the selection and integration of products, people, processes, and platforms for a seamless and frictionless business experience. This cloud management approach ensures that cloud is affordable by deploying with requisite planning and continuous assessment and reassessment. The rinse-and-repeat approach of the HCLTech Cloud Smart strategy has a number of critical elements embedded to take the end-to-end ownership and accountability backed up by a business case-driven approach. Some of the many factors that govern this approach are:

• Incubation of DevOps and SRE to the overall target operating model for maximum collaboration and reduced time to market
• Transition from siloed and manual infrastructure monitoring to an event-driven AIOps observability platform
• Target operating model transformation towards product-based, outcome-driven delivery
• Transforming data models, data analytics, DataOps, and distributed databases (NoSQL, Postgre, MySQL, MongoDB, etc.)
• Increased adoption of open-source technologies, such as ELK Stack, Apache products (Kafka for event-driven automation), and dashboards (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)
• Adoption of containers and cloud-native technologies backed up by Kubernetes and CNCF (helm, containers, harbor, etc.)
• Adoption of real-time, event-driven architecture (Kafka, Redis, etc.)
• Multi-cloud management platform and network supporting all platforms and workload types, such as bare metals, VMs, and containers
• An integrated API platform for inbound and outbound integrations
• End-to-end ownership and accountability with a proven migration factory methodology, from discovery to decommissioning

In conclusion

HCLTech Cloud Smart strategy covers all business transformation levers for an enterprise by striking the right balance between the cloud-first and cloud-native approaches. HCLTech is the only enterprise system integrator that has been awarded a Gold Membership by CNCF.