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The four R’s that define the changes in IT Operating Model to make it cloud ready
The four R’s that define the changes in IT Operating Model to make it cloud ready

April 14, 2021

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In my last blog “Cloud – A strategic necessity for businesses in the new normal” I discussed how the focus on cloud got accelerated in post the Covid-19. Moreover with the second wave of infections sweeping across the globe this focus on cloud is bound to stay if not accelerate as remote working will continue to the way of business in the new normal.

With cloud becoming a strategic priority, aligning business’ IT operating models to cloud is an important factor to derive maximum benefit from the cloud investments. One of the major challenges that has been faced by businesses is that their IT’s operating model remains stuck in a quagmire of legacy processes, methodologies, and technologies.

THE CHALLLNEGES

The four infrastructure challenges that needs to be addressed for setting up a Cloud ready IT Operating Model –

The legacy of manual intervention: Most companies still function on a manual-intervention-based operating model which includes tasks such as submitting a ticket to make an update or offering multiple service catalogs to different departments being performed manually. This reliance of manual intervention hurts application reliability and slows time to market with outages caused by human error being a key deterrent.

Lack of ownership clarity: Fragmented lines of responsibility create confusion about who should be doing which tasks – this results in customers experiencing delays in restoration of infrastructure services or in a product release.

Misaligned success metrics: Service-level metrics are traditionally defined by activities or individual team outputs, and funding is based on volume – which in turn incentivize increasing the amount of activity instead of improving performance.

Too much operations, too little engineering: In most Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) ~60% of staff focus on operations, with less than 30% staff focus on engineering new capabilities (remaining provide managerial support). This results in lack of value derived from cloud.

  • For example in case of a banking institution it was found that for every dollar it invested in engineering public and private cloud, it was investing $2.50 in operations. Primary reason behind this was that most staff often lack experience across legacy and cloud environments.

 

THE FOUR R’s

Need to build a cloud ready operating model to derive maximum value from the cloud

A cloud ready operating model focuses on four R’s which are its key components:

Realign Responsibilities - Adopt a site-reliability-engineer model

Site reliability engineers (SREs) are the glue that binds application development and core infrastructure services as they work cross-functionally, partnering with application developers, application operations, and infrastructure teams. In case of cloud ready operating models the most effective SREs maintain a balance of responsibilities between engineering and operations, with a greater than 50% percent emphasis on engineering.

Overall, the SRE model delivers rapid benefits because it brings infrastructure expertise closer to the applications and allows for direct, face-to-face collaboration across application development and infrastructure, highlighting a substantial shift for most organizations as in most cases the infrastructure resources are pooled so that functional specialists serve the entire application portfolio.

Redesign Infrastructure - Design infrastructure services as products

Siloed structure makes make traditional infrastructure operating models incompatible with agile and cloud-ready infrastructure. For I&O to be responsive and fast, it must be organized based on the infrastructure products it supports rather than by roles. For the same companies need to build agile product teams made up of people with relevant areas of expertise, including product owners, solution architects, infrastructure and software engineers, and security specialists. Product owners can collaborate with application teams to understand what services or products that are needed, which helps in preventing infrastructure teams from developing solutions that no one needs.

Right Results - Manage outcomes versus activities

Setting objectives and key results at the outset of the transformation helps application development and infrastructure teams align on what they want to achieve with their new, agile, automated IT infrastructure. These metrics also create accountability across teams. Traditionally, most organizations are either focusing on tracking activities or have different objectives/results for different teams, which is the reason behind missing the potential value. Thus, three components become critical:

  1. Building goals from the top down and bottom up i.e.  not rely on exclusively on dictating business goals from the executive level down.
  2. Set tangible stretch goals. Goals should be hard enough to promote outside-the-box thinking and present a challenge.
  3. Have the right tools and support to measure outcomes.

 

Reskill - Build an engineering-focused talent model

As companies move away from manual solutions, they will need to build a bench of engineering talent that can develop automated infrastructure solutions, such as an automated, self-healing, virtual machine that can find errors or malfunctions and solve them independently. This would need organizations to pursue internal capability building and hire external talent.

Source: McKinsey & Company

These four R’s for the basis of a shift that will help organizations in shaping up a cloud ready IT operating model. At what level each R needs to be focused on at the implementation level will vary for each organization depending on their specific situation and goals. Overall a successful cloud implementation needs perfect alignment of the 4Rs within the organization’s goals.

 


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Neha Jain
Senior Analyst

Neha Jain

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