10 public cloud practice successes

Public cloud services are evolving from a cost-cutting technology to a technology that drives business agility. Public cloud not only allows CIOs to operate data centers, but also allows them to focus on more strategic projects—digital transformation projects.

Whether this means developing mobile applications or analyzing data to enhance customer engagement, these shifts indicate that public clouds are strategic. But CIOs also see the cloud as a way to build software faster by leveraging agility, DevOps, and design thinking. According to Forrester Research, the global public cloud market will grow to $178 billion this year, driven by these technology trends, with a compound annual growth rate of 22%.

Many IT executives have enjoyed their business drivers, experiences and lessons toward the public cloud. Many people also provide practical advice or lessons for CIOs who want to make strategic changes to the public cloud.

1. Insurance company Liberty Mutual: Transfer document management to the cloud

When Liberty Mutual employees complained that downloading large documents from traditional file systems was a headache, CIO Mojgan Lefebvre decided to adopt a cloud-based content management system that runs on AWS.

Lefebvre said that now they have 1,600 insurers, actuaries and other employees downloading and sharing about 500,000 digital files in 46 offices in 18 countries around the world. Liberty employees access content in the cloud document management system Alfresco (running in the AWS regional data center). Such localization services provide almost no delay in documentation, while saving about $21 million in paper, printing and storage costs for Liberty Mutual.

“This is to build a global productivity team that can collaborate and leverage our scale of scale on a global scale. These teams effectively achieve this goal in a digital way and make technology a driving force rather than an obstacle,” Lefebvre said.

Liberty is covering the AWS implementation of the Alfresco extension to the coverage and claims portion. Lefebrvre expects that by the end of 2018, Liberty will store approximately 300 million documents in this way.

Lefebvre's lessons: inform employees about changes in advance and provide training as needed. Also ensure that end users are provided with "consistent information and set expectations, with appropriate processes to support end users."

2, concert pusher Live Nation: Cloud is our "ticket"

It’s rare for CEOs to enforce cloud migration, but Jake Burns, vice president of cloud services at Live Nation, received an order from the CEO at the end of 2015, and the company will migrate 100% to the public cloud. “He wants us to be a modern, agile company.”

Burns is a very new thing, and Burns is already considering closing some data centers and turning to at least a hybrid cloud model. Prior to migrating Live Nation's enterprise operations, including Oracle Database and SAP applications, to AWS, Burns hired approximately 20 cloud solution engineers. "Everyone agreed, we broke the bureaucracy."

Many people think that the cloud is the savior of infrastructure. But Burns said there are many complexities in the cloud, including managing virtual machines, snapshots, and backups to ensure that costs don't go out of control. "Be careful with your expectations, because once you get to the cloud, you will encounter a whole host of new problems that must be addressed." He said he has seen many cases of cloud migration failures due to uncontrollable costs. “That is to say, it is a good thing to do everything in a cost-effective way with cloud computing . We are a good proof.”

Burns suggested: hire technicians and business people who understand the costs associated with consumer cloud technology . This will protect you from the cost. "You need someone to understand the technology and be responsible for the cost." Burns is currently taking on this role at Live Nation.

3. Diversified high-tech company Honeywell: Control the process in the cloud

Honeywell International uses IBM's public cloud solution to manage oil and gas production process control systems, which reduces customer costs without sacrificing reliability, Honeywell Process Solutions business Chief Technology Officer Jason Urso said.

Previously, Urso's IT team was responsible for managing the software that the manufacturing plant was running. Today, his team "packages" control system applications in VMware, which in turn runs in IBM's cloud. “By deploying control systems in the cloud, we can provide tools that operate these wells safely, reliably, and efficiently, while not requiring the IT infrastructure they used before,” Urso said.

Honeywell also uses Microsoft Azure to collect and analyze data from various processing plants. This information helps provide advice to customers on how to increase production, uptime, and employee deployment.

The challenge: For employees accustomed to managing software and hardware, moving to the cloud poses a major challenge for change management. "We need new IT and application skills, so this is a very significant organizational change we need to make," Urso said, and his team must also adapt to maintaining network security and resiliency in a cloud environment.

4. Diversified manufacturing enterprise UTC: Support smart factories in the cloud

UTC's main business is to provide elevators, turbines and other industrial equipment. The company has a strategic agreement with Microsoft to support the company's business with Azure and other cloud technologies.

Vince Campisi, chief information officer at UTC, said Azure is accelerating computing power to support smart factory initiatives, including Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities, on-site services, maintenance and repair, and other business processes. Campisi said: "In the past, we spent two to three months providing dedicated physical equipment for the project, or six to eight weeks to prepare virtual resources. We have now shortened this time to only a few days."

UTC's Otis Elevator division uses Dynamics 365 CRM to help service technicians and sales teams better serve customers and predict when machines need to be repaired.

5, General Electric: betting huge amounts of money on AWS, Azure

After inviting Verizon Terremark CTO Chris Drumgoole, General Electric accelerated its move to the public cloud in 2014. General Electric Chief Technology Officer Drumgoole said that more than 90% of the company's new applications are running in the public cloud. “We are no longer deploying any new applications internally,” Drumgoole said. His reporter was Jim Fowler, chief information officer at General Electric.

GE runs internal and customer-facing applications on AWS and Azure. But GE's commercial Predix platform is an analysis software that helps companies service turbines and other industrial machines before they fail, and is also running in Azure. GE is still running federal-sensitive applications in its own data center, Drumgoole said. However, he expects that once the regulations "catch up", they will move to the public cloud.

Drumgoole believes that hybrid cloud is a stopgap measure before everything can run in the public cloud in the future. “We still believe that the world will eventually move towards a public cloud.”

The biggest challenge Drumgoole faces today is to decide whether to refactor the application and move it to the cloud, put it into a container and migrate the application, or let the application die and rewrite the application. The toughest problem is that niche applications that GE still needs, but have not yet prepared for the cloud, such as Java applications that rely on ERP for business functions.

Drumgoole's advice is: Be careful with vendor lock-in. Every PB you migrate means giving you more control to your cloud provider. If you choose to move back to this data, it will be a big challenge. Therefore, GE has not fully transferred to AWS and Azure. “Going out is not an easy task. We imagine a world where we no longer physically and tactically control our own data. Because if I am locked in my supply chain, I will give up the choice I wanted,” Drumgoole said.

6. Metropolitan life insurance company MetLife: public cloud ensures speed and flexibility

Public cloud is an integral part of MetLife (China-US Luen Thai Metropolitan Life Insurance), and its chief technology architect, Alex Seidita, uses cloud software to provide differentiated services and improve operations. The biggest reason MetLife migrated to the cloud was speed and business agility, and the cloud just happened to "cost savings through automation," Seidita said.

MetLife uses Microsoft Azure to power its microservices, including call center features and Infinity, an application that customers use to store photos, documents, and other content. As a result, MetLife reduced the deployment time of new virtual machines by an average of 83%. In addition, MetLife uses IBM Softlayer to run Disaster Recovery as a Service.

Since Seidita's team has collected best practices from the cloud and applied them to MetLife's own data center, moving to Azure and Softlayer gives you additional benefits. “We have been able to use the same capabilities internally and externally to automate, increasing speed and flexibility,” Seidita said.

The advice given by Seidita is that CIOs, especially those working in regulated industries, should seriously consider which software services are suitable for migration to the cloud. MetLife created a " cloud computing assessment" that examines application inventory to determine which applications can be moved to the cloud and which new applications should be developed in the cloud, based on security and governance requirements.

7. Bank of America: Doing business on the cloud

Bank of America has long refused to switch to public cloud services , claiming that its economic benefits are not worth doing, and that they have achieved some results in software-defined networking (SDN).

However, Bank of America and Microsoft Azure and Oracle reached an important cloud transaction, shocking the industry. Bank of America will use Azure to support application modernization as a key component of its digital transformation, which also includes the migration of 200,000 employees to Office 365. Currently, Bank of America uses Oracle Database for ERP and finance.

"The ability to do virtualization securely has improved dramatically," said Cathy Bessant, chief operating and technology officer at Bank of America, at the Forbes CIO Next conference in October 2017. But Bessant added: "You will find that we are very cautious in public cloud, pay-as-you-go cloud." She also pointed out that she is not sure who is running the cloud in addition to the application of Bank of America, and these How does the application affect the speed, security, or service level of Bank of America applications?

Still, Bessant said that 80% of the technical workload will run on some virtualization stack by the end of 2019.

8. Service company Merrill: Public cloud helps us transform into a technology company

Merrill Corp. It is a company that provides virtual hosting space to store sensitive corporate information (mergers and acquisitions, etc.), which is doing business transformation, using Microsoft Azure public cloud to achieve this goal. Brad Smuland, chief technology officer responsible for the transformation, said that cloud computing will transform the service company into a technology company.

Smuland runs about 1,700 servers in Microsoft Azure, 4,500 servers in local data centers, and he migrates more servers to Azure every day. Smuland said that unlike his peers who were forced to migrate to the cloud because of rising costs, he was closely watching Azure's cost of consumption. He uses Turbonomic's cloud cost management tools to determine which platform is less costly or performs better for computing tasks based on algorithms, automatically moving workloads from local servers to Azure, and vice versa.

Smuland said the change required Merrill, a 3,000-employee company in 36 locations around the world, to redesign IT systems and re-train talent. He had to hire and train employees, including software engineers, network security engineers, product managers, and user experience designers. These technicians take care of the local and cloud infrastructure, are responsible for the new network security model, and use the microservices to build native cloud applications in the DevOps environment. Some of the existing IT staff have "voluntarily" gone, but Smuland said he has to push other employees into a transformational journey, emphasizing how such a migration can be more cultural rather than functional.

“We are fully open-minded, but actually more than I expected. The transformation revolves around changes in skills, cultural change, and methodological changes. This involves the structure of people and the way we operate, and we do a lot of work in these areas. ”

Smuland's advice is that it is important to change the IT culture and improve skills, but at the same time Smuland said that CIOs must work with strategic partners to succeed. "These key strategic partnerships (such as Microsoft and Turbonomic) are critical to success and speed. Without them, I can't do it. Our CIOs often feel that they have to push, develop, and take responsibility for themselves. ”

9. American Airlines: Public Clouds

In order to facilitate collaboration with business executives and automate software delivery, American Airlines found the answer in the cloud. According to Daniel Henry, vice president of customer technology at American Airlines, they are moving corporate websites, mobile applications and other digital services to IBM cloud services to drive architectural updates and accelerate software development. Henry said that the key reason for choosing IBM is to look at the cooperation between IBM and Cloud Foundry, the open source platform-as-a-service environment used by the United States to develop "cloud native" applications.

"We want to build an application that will enable us to quickly add functionality to our website and meet our business needs. Creating our cloud native application in the IBM cloud gives us the opportunity to do this."

Henry said that American Airlines also adopted IBM's "garage" approach, which includes architecture, best practices for developing software using microservices, agility and DevOps. The idea is to enable American Airlines engineers to better collaborate with business executives, automate software delivery processes, and increase application development speed for employees and customers.

For American Airlines, the cloud is the trigger point to reshape the way IT teams deliver software to businesses. "That's not to say that you are required to move to the cloud, but this is enough to motivate you to say, 'Maybe we need to re-evaluate the way we do business to improve efficiency and improve collaboration'."

Henry said that although American Airlines has been working with IBM for many years, especially with IBM's professional services, they have not stepped into the door of cloud computing. “We did a wide range of PoCs and were very excited about the results. They did it.”

Henry's advice is: Let go and do it. Although there is a lot of information about the cloud, CIOs should take risks. Companies should also be committed to self-remodeling. "It is impossible to maintain the status quo forever, otherwise you will not see an increase in efficiency. You must know that the result will be better."

10, genealogy website Ancestry. Com: plant your family tree in the public cloud

Genomic data has recently become more competitive in the service market. In order to gain an advantage, Ancestry. Com announced that it will "all-in" AWS: AWS will host Ancestry. Com's billions of history, including genealogy and customer DNA profiles, Ancestry. Nat Natarajan, executive vice president of products and technologies at com, said.

“We do our best because we believe that to continue to grow our business, we need to increase the speed of innovation,” Natarajan said. Within six months, Ancestry. Com has transferred more than half of its data, 8PB, to AWS, and he said that as more consumers look for information about their ancestors, Ancestry. Com will achieve faster international growth.

Ancestry. Com uses multiple AWS services (including platform as a service, serverless computing and other tools) and has migrated 6,000 server instances and 550 databases from 12,000 server instances to the AWS cloud, with the goal of 2017 Most of the Ancestry before. Com consumer products migrated to AWS.

Natarajan said: "Speed ​​is our real motivation. How fast can we do something? We believe this is the fastest way we can achieve our goals."

Natarajan's advice is: get executive support, recognizing that moving to the cloud is not about technology, but more about operations, processes, and people, and appointing a dedicated person in charge of the transformation. Natarajan said: “Thinking about the changes in operations, culture and skills, these are crucial.”