There has been an explosion in the use of hybrid and public cloud services over the last few years as leadership teams look to augment or replace some of their IT capabilities.
And this is a strategy that certainly makes sense in a business environment that demands ever-increasing levels of efficiency. However, as with any form of change, there is an inherent element of risk that must be factored into the decision-making process.
Moving IT functions into public or hybrid clouds is no different in this regard. Indeed, with cloud providers expanding into new markets, offering new capabilities through acquisitions, encountering the occasional service issues, and increasingly engaging in price wars, it is clear that many potential risks exist. So it’s only right that any decision to move IT capabilities into public or hybrid clouds is considered carefully. But what happens if it all goes wrong?
Senior IT leadership teams often spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and resources selecting hybrid or public cloud providers. But much less time is spent considering or creating a cloud exit strategy if things don’t go as planned.
By 2018, 50 per cent of Global 1000 companies will have exited a hybrid or public cloud relationship before their contract expires. So it is only prudent that businesses should layout the foundations of a plan for what happens if their initial selection doesn’t work out as hoped.
Contract terminations can occur for any number of reasons. These range from poor levels of availability and reliability to incidents of competitive encroachment, whereby an acquisition or change in strategy sees the provider become a competitor of the customer.
Other common causes of a soured relationship include a decline in service quality, an unacceptable number of outages, a lack of remuneration for downtime, an increase in prices/hidden fees, and a breach of security or privacy.
Whatever the reason, it is clear that business and technology executives must protect themselves from the pace of change and the increasing risk levels associated with security, technology, process, data protection, compliance, and governance.
To do this, they must plan for a potential cloud exit before they sign the initial contract for cloud services. Indeed, it should form part of the initial cloud vendor selection process itself. Organisations should never wait until after the contract has been signed to embark on this process; by then, it is already too late.
We firmly believe that planning is the key to a successful cloud exit, so what areas should this plan consider? Unfortunately, there is no shortcut to getting this right, as every aspect of the organisation’s interaction with the cloud provider must be considered. In that respect, any framework for implementing an effective cloud exit strategy must cover issues pertaining to data, application programming interfaces, source code access, standards, application portability analysis, management and monitoring, and work stream mapping, to name just a few.
And that’s just from the technology side of things. There are also various legal and contractual considerations that must be factored into the plan, as well as issues around internal IT policies and skills. To that end, it is important to establish detailed cloud usage policies and determine how those policies might have to change during an exit. It is also imperative that organisations ensure they have the required skill sets in place prior to exiting a contract and moving application workloads back into a private cloud.
Ultimately, leadership teams must consider the timing and implementation steps needed to reduce the risks to the business, technology, process, and staff. Separating systems, technologies, processes, and functional areas is difficult.
But through proper preparation, a cloud exit decision can be made quickly and decisively, thereby minimising disruptions to other services and capabilities, and — of course — to the overall business. And by maintaining relationships with various cloud platform providers, leadership teams can continuously be gathering knowledge about potential alternatives.
Once the decision to exit has been made, the leadership team must plan for de-integration and determine what type of separation will best meet the organisation’s needs.
At this point, they must consider the implementation steps required to generate the maximum value from the switch, while simultaneously mitigating risks. They must decide whether to leave the cloud provider completely or just select underperforming capabilities that are better provided elsewhere. This will largely be determined by the reason for termination, but such variables must be factored into the exit plan.
Leaving a cloud provider is rarely a one-off activity, so it makes sense to get it right. Our research shows that those organisations that actively manage their cloud capability portfolios in a disciplined fashion routinely outperform competitors that accept poor service. These organisations create an inherent capacity to identify and take advantage of cloud capabilities whenever they arise.
The best CIOs and IT teams have become “cloud adaptable” — able to consistently move at the right time to create the most value for the businesses that depend on them. Preparing for the unexpected is all part of that, which is why every modern organisation should have a comprehensive cloud exit strategy in place.
The columnist is group vice president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC). He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC
