Today, businesses are adopting the cloud as part of the transformation journey to improve business agility, customer relationships while delivering operational efficiencies. However, most Organizations have no mechanism to measure the effectiveness of Cloud Adoption. Also, there exists very little guidance on the measurement of Cloud adoption effectiveness within the organization. Most Organizations focus on the definition and Completeness of the Cloud adoption and Maturity of Cloud development processes rather than the effectiveness of Cloud adoption measurement.
To ensure that Cloud adoption is progressing well, and is also adding value to the Organization, there is a need to define metrics for measuring the effectiveness it, which is mostly done by the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) of the organization. However, Cloud metrics is still an emerging field and there are no defined standards. Cost, Time to Market, ROI, Technology are the prominent areas that determine which Workloads should be moved to the cloud.
A Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) is a cross-functional team that leads cloud Go-No-Go, Cloud Migration, Cloud Adoption, and Cloud operations within the organization. The CCOE is responsible for developing and managing the cloud strategy, governance, and best practices that the rest of the organization can leverage to transform the business using the cloud.
Traditionally, CCOE has been measured on the immediate benefits that it provides to the organization. Although CCOE has a significant impact on how the IT organization aligns with Business if CCOE Metrics are only limited to measuring Business-IT alignment, they would fail to measure the long-term impact of Cloud adoption and more importantly its impact on business as an enabler and catalyst of change.
Based on the author's interactions with various customers, the following are the practical challenges that we encountered in measuring the effectiveness of Cloud Adoption:
Cloud Metrics not only helps in gauging the long-term impact of Cloud adoption by an organization but also helps in measuring the true value of Cloud which will enable the Organization to plan more effectively and efficiently.
Measuring Cloud metrics is necessary to,
The Cloud adoption success measurement should,
For the Cloud adoption program to be successful, it needs to be periodically monitored and measured with respect to a set of defined Cloud Metrics. The status of these metrics can be captured, presented, and communicated effectively using Cloud adoption scorecards or dashboards to the Cloud Governing body.
Cloud adoption Metrics estimate the progress of Cloud COE during the early stages of Cloud adoption. It also helps in recognizing the efficiency and effectiveness of Cloud COE to ensure that the true value of Cloud is delivered to the business.
For the Cloud COE to be successful, it needs to be periodically monitored and measured with respect to a set of defined Cloud Adoption Metrics. The status of these metrics can be captured, presented, and communicated effectively to Organization Steering Committee at regular intervals. The most commonly used Cloud adoption metrics for an Organization are defined in the table below. These Metrics are classified as,
These are purely based on author's experience. Again these vary from domain to domain and customer to customer.
| Customer Metrics | |||
| Objective | Metrics | Cloud COE Involvement | Benefits |
| Business Value due to Cloud Adoption | Business process efficiency: Improvements made to the business process (quality, costs) through cloud architecture initiatives.
| Enable Simplified and Standardised solutions that are Modular | Improved reliability, quality, and efficiency |
| Application Latency | Migrate more applications to the cloud from on-premise. Improve in response time. | Design of Cloud Native applications | Faster response compared to an on-premise solution |
| Operational Integrity | Impact of architecture initiatives on the Operational Integrity aspects:
| Facilitate the architecting & design of reliable solutions that are easy to operate | Reduces downtime of IT applications |
| Modernizing IT | Improve the traffic to the website, better buying experience, retain the existing customers, and better customer satisfaction | Modernizing IT, revamping legacy applications | Providing benefits to customers through a better user experience with low cost |
| Fiancial Metrics | |||
| Objective | Metrics | Cloud COE Involvement | Benefits |
| Optimize the resource cost |
| Identify and consolidate all the resources that are contributing towards the cost | Ensure better resource utilization which is directly proportional to optimizing the cost |
| Enabling Organization using Latest Technologies | Benefits from using the latest technologies (e.g.: Reduce Capex through the usage of SaaS, PaaS, IaaS solutions & new technologies)
| Innovation driving Efficient Investments through the usage of new technologies | Ensure better ROIs and minimum technical debts |
| Asset Reuse | Maximize the IT Asset Reuse (applications & servers): Number of shared services, Sharing of server infrastructure & Application reuse
| Improve the IT Asset reuse through better governance | Application and Server infrastructure reuse has a significant positive impact on the organization |
| Technology Metrics | |||
| Metrics | Cloud COE Involvement | Benefits | |
| Open Source technologies Usage | Is Organization leveraging Open source technologies? | Tools Identification and Usage | Reduce the workload of development and operations |
| Automation | What level of automation is currently in place at the organization
| Provide immediate responses to events, such as configuration changes or sudden increases in workload | Reduce the manual workload of managing infrastructure |
| Service Availability | Number of service interruptions Comparison of service downtime between cloud and On-premise environment | Helps in setting up a more robust cloud environment | Arrive in better service availability |
| Process Metrics | |||
| Objective | Metrics | Cloud COE Involvement | Benefits |
| Regulatory Compliance
| Regulatory Compliance • No. of Instances that audit teams have consulted Cloud repositories for legal, regulatory compliance documentation • Percent of policies in the compliant state (%) • Cost-optimized over time ($) • Cost-optimized per policy over time ($) | Support Legal / Regulatory Compliance through Cloud repositories/activities
| Provide an insight into the IT controls that are in place
|
| Risk Mitigation | • % of compliance with security policies • % variance in schedule • Number of incidents related to unsubscribe • Severity of exceptions | Used to drive preventive measures that can be taken to avoid potential risks generated from cloud computing adoption | |
| Improved Delivery Model
|
| Design and manage the Cloud Service Catalogue Define Chargeback model | Streamline approval process and reduce deployment time from months to days, to hours. Bring financial transparency with Bill of IT |
| Governance Metrics | |||
| Objective | Metrics | Cloud COE Involvement | Benefits |
| IT Staffing
| What is the current spending on Operations and Development | Create a clear breakdown, to assess the impact of the cloud on organization workload
| Reduce the Operational Overhead of running IT. Frees up the workforce to focus more on building and maintaining applications. |
| Training | Number of training provided on cloud migration, cloud-native adoption across the organization | Improve the Cloud awareness across the organization | Improve the cloud adoption |
| Collaboration | What type of tools, knowledge, technologies supporting the cloud initiative across the organization | Promote the tools, technologies across the organization | Enhance the collaboration and eliminate the duplicate usage of tools and technologies |
| Senior Management Support | Assess the impact of cloud adoption across the organization How effectively KPI's are met | Be part of Executive Team of Organization and provide updates about CCOE to senior manage | Provide updates to Senior Management about every stage of the cloud journey |
To ensure that Cloud adoption is progressing well, and is also adding value to the organization, there is a need to define metrics for measuring the progress and performance of Cloud adoption.
The Cloud adoption metrics are defined in terms of effectiveness, agility, and alignment to business goals and strategies. Once Cloud adoption is properly implemented and business entities are engaged, it will improve the overall planning activities of the organization and not just IT.
The authors would like to thank Vijayasimha A & Raju Alluri of Wipro Digital Architecture Practice of Wipro Ltd for giving the required time and support in many ways in bringing up this article.
Dr.Gopala Krishna Behara is a Distinguished Member and Lead Enterprise Architect in Wipro Technologies with 25+ years of extensive experience in the ICT industry. He serves as an Advisory Architect, Mentor on Enterprise Architecture, Application Modernization and continues to work as a Subject Matter Expert and Author. He is certified in Open Group TOGAF, AWS Solution Architect -Associate, IBM Cloud Solutions, and UNPAN. Published a number of research papers, books in the IT industry. He has been a speaker at National and International forums and bodies like The Open Group, National e-Governance Forum. He has been a moderator and panel member for multiple technical/business forums like IGI Global, AEA, Open Group, and Premium College meets. Recipient of EA Hall of Fame International Award – Individual Leadership in EA Practice, Promotion and Professionalization Award. He can be reached at: gopalkrishna.behra@wipro.com.Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gopalbehara/
The views expressed in this article/presentation are that of the author and Wipro does not subscribe to the substance, veracity, or truthfulness of the said opinion.
