In recent years, cloud computing has significantly improved how CIOs are able to deliver and innovate business applications and services. In addition to providing potential cost savings, and shifting the financial model from capex to opex, CIOs have used the intrinsic agility of cloud-based infrastructures to respond quickly to changing market conditions and ever-increasing end-user expectations.
These business benefits, however, have not come completely without cost. The provision of this increased flexibility for the business has created a corresponding increase in complexity for IT. Today, CIOs are dealing with multi-vendor environments with a spiraling number of cloud vendors making management and governance an ongoing battle even for the most leading-edge organizations.
To tackle these commonplace management and governance challenges in your enterprise, and extract the maximum business value from your investments, here are three recommendations for your multi-vendor cloud strategy:
Align your cloud strategy with your digital transformation objectives
A solid cloud foundation is perhaps the most important technical asset of any digital business today. It equips organizations, from startups to major corporations, with an agile infrastructure that can scale up and down on demand and which acts as a foundation for ongoing, iterative business innovation.
At their core, the majority of today’s platform business models rely on a robust cloud foundation. It’s a key part of their success and why these companies are typically valued at four times that of their more traditional business model counterparts. The cloud platform enables “permissionless innovation” where an ecosystem of customers and partners are free to innovate on top of the platform – with new apps, services and content – to further extend and enhance its overall value proposition.
By aligning your cloud strategy with your digital transformation objectives, you can get the most from your cloud investments and ensure every project is supporting your corporate business goals. In this manner, IT is putting in place an intrinsic ability to react to business needs and to support the business in its digital transformation. Your cloud strategy, and its evolution, should therefore be a key part of your roadmap for digital transformation.
Adopt multisourcing service integration to reduce costs, complexity and risk
Multisourcing service integration (MSI), also known as service integration and management (SIAM), is a highly effective approach to manage and govern multiple service providers and is comprised of the following key functions:
- Service delivery coordination – Assisting with decision processes to select service providers, manage onboarding of service providers and related process implementations/changes
- Service aggregation and brokerage – Enabling service providers by integrating processes and tools to aggregate data, ensuring single source of truth, and simplifying provisioning
- Service desk – Determining what information needs (if any) to be synchronized between service provider ITSM tools and integrating to master CMDB
- Relationship coordination – Determining metrics that need to be available to measure performance, ensuring capabilities are available to systematically access these metrics and centralizing for central Service Level Management
- Multivendor management – Determining processes for how the business and service providers work between each other, rules for escalation, and managing incidents across multiple service providers
- End to end performance management – Providing SLA reporting and managing the continuous improvement lifecycle based on business goals and priorities
By adopting MSI practices, either in-house or via an outsourced MSI provider, you can avoid common issues in cloud vendor management by reducing cost and complexity, lowering risk and improving performance. This helps to provide a single source of truth, increased transparency and visibility, and helps avoid the common “finger pointing” among vendors when issues inevitably arise.
Use MSI partners for governance so your staff can focus more time on innovation
By using an external MSI provider to manage and enable of each partners in this ecosystems, you can free up a significant number of internal IT resources to focus on higher level tasks pertaining to the core business as well as to continued IT innovation. This is especially important so that more staff can be leveraged to support the numerous digital transformation goals and objectives discussed previously.
For IT to deliver on it’s true potential to transform the business, as opposed to being relegated or maintained as an “order-taker”, a sizable portion of these IT staff must be available to work on critical new projects as opposed to business-as-usual and “keeping the lights on”. Since cloud vendor management is so resource-intensive in time, cost and human capital, this is a strong area for potential outsourcing since it frees up so much existing capacity within IT.
MSI partners can help to establish a single point of contact, ownership and control for IT services, establish end-to-end service management, clearly-defined roles and responsibilities, optimized costs and streamlined processes which all lead to increased customer satisfaction.
Why Technology Spa
Technology Spa partners with its enterprise customers on their Cloud journey – across all stages of that journey – from Strategy & Governance through Operations Management. Security & Compliance are inter-woven across all four primary capability areas.
From an MSI partner perspective, we understand that technology is not one-size-fits-all. Through our Cloud Service Orchestration services, we deliver multisourcing service integration to enable automation and orchestration of business and operational processes to enhance agility and speed to market.
Whether you’re looking for a completely outsourced solution, or an open-source cloud brokering solution that you can bring in-house, Technology Spa has the knowledge and experience to provide you with true peace of mind.