are augmenting every
field of enterprise
Digital technologies are changing how companies market their products, compete for customers and run their operations. Driven by the falling cost of compute power, and the mass availability and adoption of mobile devices and connections, every aspect of business life is changing. From the factory floor to the research laboratory to the mobile worker, processes are being streamlined, and manual tasks automated. Data is flowing more freely than ever before and now we have the tools to turn it into actionable intelligence, in real time.
As this multi-decade revolution proceeds into its next phase, there is an opportunity for organisations that haven’t yet integrated such technologies into every facet of their business. To apply innovative applications backed by commodity-cost computing power and storage. To connect their disparate operations to derive insight and deliver greater control. To achieve both a superior digital customer experience and digital operational excellence.
Business operations have so far benefited from cost reductions driven by IT architecture consolidation, process automation and outsourcing. The increasing adoption of smart machines and industrialized services into core processes provides an even greater opportunity to drive down costs.
But more important than cost-savings is the increased productivity and creativity that these technologies make possible. Cloud and connected technologies are augmenting individual capabilities, speeding time to market, increasing research power and presenting entirely new business opportunities. They are fundamentally altering the dynamics of the markets in which businesses operate and the agility needed to remain competitive.
In this paper we bring together original research on the applications of cloud computing in the enterprise and look at the drivers that are pushing companies to adopt at an incredible rate. We also address some of the barriers that have historically prevented organisations from implementing cloud options and examine how those barriers are starting to fall with the introduction of bridging technologies like Cloud-IX by TelecityGroup.
Digital transformation opportunities that CxOs can’t ignore Product to Sell Challenges: Security, IPR, Commercial models Opportunities:
Digitize organizational capabilities Monetise information assets Scale digital offerings
IT Cost Management
Challenges:
Loss of control,Security, Availability, Data residency Opportunities:
Trade Capex for low upfront Opex Scale DevOps infrastructure without long-term commitments
Reduce lifecycle expenses (up to 3x core dev) with implicit shared services
Product-to-Build
Challenges:
IT bypassed, Organisational culture, Vanguard moving to scale tipping point Opportunities:
Embed digital services in product/service for superior customer experience
Accelerate go-to-market Reduce launch risks Trial several options rapidly
Business Intelligence
Challenges:
Legacy IT, Organisational culture, Business clarity
Opportunities:
Combine internal, external data Real-time insights
Identify growth opportunities
Product-to-Serve
Challenges:
Cannibalise existing revenues Strategic technology leadership Opportunities:
New business models Differentiated positioning Business agility
Structural cost advantages
Big Data
Challenges:
Scale out from existing IT
Specialised infrastructure, Security, IPR Opportunities:
Accelerate the return of results Force multiplier
We have characterised six primary applications of public cloud-based technologies that are driving adoption in enterprises today. Though cost remains part of the story, these applications extend purely cost-based arguments for the adoption of the public cloud and demonstrate how the scale and flexibility it brings can enhance the operational capability of businesses that do not fit the mould of tech-driven early adopters. Rather these are the ways that a much broader range of organisations are using computing capacity on demand to grow their revenues, enhance their products and expand their audiences.
IT Cost Management
The simplest way to do more with less is to look at your costs. And many corporations are looking to trade capital expenditure on new hardware and software for cloud-based alternatives - one of the first major drivers of public cloud uptake, both through cloud-based hosting of applications and the adoption of core software on a service model (SaaS).
This clearly has implications for operational expenditure and particularly with SaaS options, the long term costs may become painful, as adoption of a given platform scales within a business. This may drive a return to private cloud or a locally hosted solution, but in the short term there are clear advantages in agility and lower upfront outlay.
Depending on which estimate you look at, between 80-85% of enterprise IT spending from such verticals remains locked on-premise/in-house. Increasingly, a number of these enterprises are going to be moving a part of that spending towards public cloud services.
Product to Build
Public cloud infrastructure can scale with demand, from free instances for prototyping, through to global platforms for the largest digital services. This makes it enormously attractive for new product development, and has made the public cloud the venue for much development work that bypasses the traditional IT function. ‘Spinning up’ in AWS or Microsoft Azure can reduce time to market and align operational costs with business growth. As software becomes a core component of the proposition for so many organisations, they are recruiting more and more developers for whom the public cloud is the default sandbox and natural venue for hosting applications. Whether it’s a customer self-service application, web interface for home automation, or the back end for a mobile app, the public cloud is the obvious location for reasons of ease, scale and cost.
Product to Sell
Access to the public cloud allows companies to experiment with lower risks, finding new routes to market for existing assets. Companies often sit on mines of data that may have an external value but creating a channel for that data asset may in the past have been complex and capital-intensive. Utilising public cloud infrastructure and off-the-shelf assets, companies are beginning to push hidden assets like these out into the marketplace. Examples might include historical news and media assets, or market data. Many companies operate in markets whose performance is a great proxy for local, national or international economies – e.g. logistics. This information could have a value. For any digital or digitisable asset, the cloud makes storage, indexing, presentation and importantly, monetisation, cheap.
Business Intelligence
Connecting people and systems, and automating processes, inherently creates more data inside an organisation. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that this creates more value, for the management of that organisation, or for its customers. The elastic nature of cloud storage has made the maintenance of data easier, but it is the elastic nature of the computing power available to support the latest applications that has made it truly valuable. Real time analytics and business intelligence not only informs better management decision making, it can provide added value to customers about how their service or product is performing.
As companies increasingly digitise their processes, deploy smart machines and sensors, and automate the delivery of insights, it follows that more data is recorded about the day-to-day operations inside that company. At the same time, more interactions are happening outside an organisation’s boundaries with customers, channel partners and opinion makers in digital, primarily internet spaces. This means businesses need to integrate complex machine, human and web data with the potential to reap enormous value.
The challenge historically has been integrating and processing these datasets, but today, tools are readily available in the cloud. Low up-front costs that are typically associated with such cloud-based tools reduce the risk inherent in such complex integrations. Furthermore, a number of cloud-based tools are increasingly pre-integrated with data sources and this accelerates the generation of insights. Bridging internal and external data into a single system with the power to combine and analyse it in real-time can provide executives with incredible insight into their organisation’s performance and into future opportunities.
Big Data
Start reading about cloud computing and it’s not long before you find the phrase ‘big data’. Often a near-meaningless marketing term, the ability to store and process huge data sets gains serious value when applied to scientific and engineering research and development. Whether you’re modelling drugs, turbines or weather systems, the ability to tap vast amounts of compute power on demand can accelerate the return of results by weeks, months or even years.
In industries where there the most valuable resources are highly-qualified individuals with years of research experience and incredible minds, it’s vital to maximise productivity to maintain market position. Cloud resources can act as a ‘force multiplier’, enabling high-value professionals to deliver more, faster. Shared infrastructure in the public cloud drops the capital barrier to this incredible potential, opening up access and creating competitive advantage for those players smart enough to use it.
Product to Serve
If a product is connected, there’s no need for the manufacturer’s relationship with it to end as it leaves the warehouse. In fact, why have it leave the warehouse at all when access to even physical services can be offered over the digital web?
For example, instead of selling lab equipment, one company now offers customers remote access to an automated lab, over the web. Jet engine manufacturers are now offering their products on a remotely-monitored service basis: instead of buying the product and servicing it themselves, the airline instead buys ‘Thrust as a Service’ and the manufacturer ensures the engines continue to deliver.
The cloud combined with fast-advancing sensors and broad connectivity means that it’s increasingly easy for manufacturers to sell their systems as services, and engage customers in an ongoing relationship.
The strategic role of technology leaders in the business has been discussed for decades. Is the role of the CIO or CTO to keep the lights on or drive the business forward? And can CEOs, CMOs and CFOs leave technology decisions purely to technologists, when business strategies are being increasingly driven by the technology capabilities of their organizations? In any organisation where these questions are yet to be addressed, the coming technology-driven transformations will make the answer plain. Mastery of the incoming generation of cloud and connected technologies will be inseparable from business success.
Facing the Challenges
These use cases illustrate the primary reasons that companies are digitising their businesses, increasingly with the public cloud as the primary platform. But there are barriers too, preventing companies from adopting at the rate and scale they otherwise might.
The primary concern reported by CIOs when quizzed about moving to a public cloud platform is security, closely followed by the network performance and latency issues inherent in a public internet-based connection to cloud services. Given the variety of cloud service providers (CSPs) and SaaS platforms out there, there’s also an understandable concern about managing interactions between them: it’s inevitable that different platforms might be most appropriate for different applications. But managing multiple platforms and their interconnections could be even more complicated than managing the organic sprawl that exists in most large enterprises today.
TelecityGroup might be considered an unlikely candidate to tackle these challenges: many present the data centre model and the public cloud as being explicitly at odds. Mutually exclusive even. You either choose to run your own hardware, or you don’t.
The reality is rather more complex. There are applications, both new and legacy, that for a variety of reasons are best suited to a private environment, while others are most suited to the public cloud, for all the reasons outlined above. Because of the challenges of creating secure, low-latency links between the two, and because of the management challenges it has presented, many enterprises have chosen to stick entirely with their private environments. But this leaves them at risk of being outperformed and outcompeted on cost and speed to market by more flexible competitors.
TelecityGroup’s Cloud-IX platform allows its customers with an established presence in a data centre to easily and quickly provision instances from major CSPs – initially, Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS. With a secure, high performance (Layer 3 MPLS) connection between data centre and CSP – many of which already have a presence in TelecityGroup’s facilities – Cloud-IX overcomes many of the CIO’s traditional objections to the public cloud and enables them to rapidly build hybrid architectures.
As well as provisioning public cloud assets to support their own applications, enterprises can use Cloud-IX as an interconnection point to popular SaaS toolsets. Hosted CRM systems, marketing automation tools, ERP and procurement platforms are increasingly popular for the increased speed to market, flexibility and cost savings they offer. With Cloud-IX, CIOs can now simply tie these platforms back into their legacy systems over secure, high performance links, making them a seamless part of the enterprise suite. Setting up and tearing down new connections takes a matter of minutes with Cloud-IX’s custom interface.
Solve for Cloud
Conclusion
Technology’s inexorable advance is fundamentally changing the economics and operations of many businesses. As more and more parts of the enterprise find themselves part of the expanding internet, the opportunity to automate and accelerate grows. Maximising this opportunity is a matter of agility: the ability to create and connect systems, and provision the compute power and applications to drive and control them quickly.
The public cloud presents enterprises with the opportunity to scale and experiment, with low risk and low capital costs. This capability has always been balanced with risks and limitations: control, security and interconnection.
Cloud-IX by TelecityGroup solves this conundrum, enabling enterprises to combine the public cloud and their existing systems in a single, powerful, integrated whole.
Key benefits of Cloud-IX
Channel Partners
TelecityGroup is offering Telecom Carriers, Managed Services Providers, ICT solution providers and Systems Integrators the opportunity to bundle and resell Cloud-IX services with their own solutions
The reseller is at liberty to bundle virtual circuits/CSP services any which way they see fit to their end-customers
There are no restrictions on how they resell the service to their end-customers
There are volume discounts on port charges
CSPs
Provide services via secure, “walled-garden”
Starburst services into all secure data centre locations simultaneously, irrespective of particular PoP location selected
Starburst across EMEA Low-barrier option to penetrate Enterprise IT ecosystems
Dedicated presales and professional services
In-country support Potential joint marketing & sales initiatives
Enterprise
Transporting data over such a dedicated connection, rather than over the public internet, guarantees security
Consistent performance, latency and other technical payload parameters
Consume the same comprehensive catalogue of services from any of the 37 data centre locations
Orchestration capabilities:set up, change and tear down virtual circuits not just into any CSP, but also string together any group of CSP services in the Cloud-IX ecosystem
