Cloud Strategy
Introduction
For any modern organization, IT is a critical enabler of the business. The IT Estate that supports a business typically has accumulated over many years, and, in general, your IT estate is more diverse and heterogeneous the older it is. If you are a new startup, your existing estate may be tiny; however, if you are a 100-year-old bank, you are probably running everything from mainframes to iPads. The starting point for architects when asked to develop a cloud strategy for the organization is this complex environment
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An effective Cloud Strategy needs to take into account a vast landscape. A Cloud Strategy includes the technical platforms, the application portfolio, the status of those applications, the future business needs, even the current level of skills within the organization.
We break down the strategy into two main components :
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Modernization - An approach to evaluating an IT estate and building a broad IT strategy for upgrade and digitisation in line with business priorities.
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Migration - Developing a strategy to take best advantage of public cloud and comparing the benefits and challenges with a variety of cloud migration patterns
Technical Challenges
It is easy to underestimate the technical complexity of large organizations. They typically have hundreds or thousands of applications that are necessary for their business. Many of those applications have multiple environments (e.g. development, test, pre-production etc) for each application, often distributed over multiple countries, hosting provides, data centers, legal entities, lines of business, and organizations. The reality is often an extremely high degree of existing complexity with the added complication of a wide range of standards and best practices accumulated over many years and across the organization.
The challenge for the cloud architect is to help the business re-factor their IT environment to take advantage of the cloud. The target cloud environment must provide all the functionality of their existing environment but with far greater simplicity, reducing the overhead driven by unnecessary complexity and thus reducing operational costs.
We will cover these challenges and how they can be addressed with Oracle in two later sections. If you are more interested in technical architecture, then you can skip directly to those sections :
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Cloud Architecture covers the pure statisc architecture considerations with detailed best practice recommendations.
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Infrastructure as Code covers how Infrastructure-as-code can help redefine deployment processes to lower cost, reduce risk and speed up deployments.