Cloud Adoption – It's Time to Get Serious

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For the modern workplace to work well and keep up, IT must adopt modern cloud-based management techniques.

Often manageable by AI, service deployment location and resource allocation becomes a runtime decision optimized around configurable key performance metrics such as priority, performance (latency, bandwidth, and so forth), commercial cost, workload balance, and availability.

Tenant business platforms and services

These are hosted across the distributed actualization platform. They are the new focal point for monetization.

Leveraging the building block services available on actualization platforms, developers can create software components, employing DevSecOps delivery pipelines, and orchestrate them together into processes and business platforms. Each service component could be built cloud-natively to run on specific cloud platforms like Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and IBM as well as employing container technologies.

Workload portability becomes less of an issue if deployed services expose APIs that are accessible by orchestrators to chain together and manage with resource slicing for end-to-end service delivery.

Because they can rely on and trust actualization platforms, developers can focus 90 percent of their activities on optimizing the actual value-add of the business platforms being developed. Business platforms can become easily configurable logical assemblies of component functions and services. This ability to focus on the business problem significantly speeds development and enables a much more effective customer and service management experience.

Examples of tenant business platforms, functions, and applications include:

TM Forum ODA-based BSS/OSS, VNF/CNF
Office collaboration and communications tools such as Microsoft 365/Teams, Salesforce, Slack, Zoom, and more
Modern cloud-based management tools such as Microsoft Autopilot, Intune, Sentinel
Service orchestrators such as LFN ONAP, Netcracker, Amdocs
Media creation, processing, and delivery systems, CDN
Cross-industry and IoT platforms like connected auto, robotic factory, smart city, smart healthcare, enhanced retail, oil, gas, and mining, energy and power, renewables, and water, among others

Business transformation

It is the synergy obtained by embracing all these aspects of digital transformation that ultimately creates the greatest potential value. Cloud adoption permeates across all three digital transformation areas discussed above. However, to achieve maximum economic benefit and optimize the “cloudonomics,” all these areas of cloud-based digital transformation become necessary.

Each provides an important supporting role.

Equipping employees with modern workplace productivity and collaboration tools impacts everything employees do, from creating products and services and writing code to how well employees can understand and support customers.

For the modern workplace to work well and keep up, IT must adopt modern cloud-based management techniques. BSS/OSS must also become as agile as the new 5G enabled connected services they manage. Modern DevSecOps lifecycle management processes become essential.

Finally, the availability of the actualization platform itself provides a robust marketplace of first- and third-party building block services and components. Supporting all six workload archetypes, the actualization platform provides an elastic, converged infrastructure to deploy, orchestrate, and manage complex connected devices, services, and business platforms at global scale securely and efficiently.

Being all-in on the cloud is not just about survival. Ultimately, it is about how to thrive.