Over the past decade, interest in going ‘cloud-first’ has grown steadily. The ‘cloud-first’ strategy has been considered a best practice in the digital transformation of organisations worldwide.
While IT leaders and C-level executives take advantage of the cloud move benefits and organisations are still catching up to deploy the ‘cloud-first’ model, there appears to be another shift taking place.
Today, most IT organisations surveyed by McAfee have embraced a cloud-first strategy. However, the total was down by 17 per cent from the previous year, according to the research.
A newly proposed ‘cloud-smart’ strategy builds on years of lessons learned about the cloud following the introduction of the Cloud First policy introduced in 2010 by the U.S. federal government, which included the ground-breaking transition to the cloud.
The new smart cloud entails moving beyond the ‘cloud-first’ paradigm, and looking at the cloud as ‘an operating model, not just a place,’ according to Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies. It’s about the cloud journey and achieving the right outcomes for the organisation, as opposed to the cloud destination.
This line of thinking is taking hold across industries and introduces a new perspective on cloud strategies. According to Ian Jansen Van Rensburg, senior manager of systems engineering for VMware Southern Africa, enterprises are now moving away from infrastructure-based strategies and thinking ‘app-first.’
The ‘app-first’ strategy should consider first the business-critical and customer-facing applications that an organisation needs, and only then determine the best infrastructure and platform to deliver these applications – public, private or hybrid cloud, as well as on-premises.
Every organisation has a unique mix of apps that require specific deployment strategies. The ‘cloud-smart’ approach means acknowledging that there might not be a single cloud solution that meets the needs of an application or a business service..
Furthermore, some applications may need on-premises implementation as opposed to ‘cloud-first’ deployment. Other key considerations for a smart approach to the cloud is the high availability of the specific application, security protocols and data sensitivity, and platform flexibility to minimise costly resources.
Read more on VMware.
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