The beginning of 2020 has been a test for the promises of elasticity, agility and scalability made on behalf of Cloud in recent years. The test will continue, as the companies resort to application redesigns to allow supplementing the functionalities needed for remote work or online interactions with customers. In Romania, by the end of 2020, 46% of the companies* will transfer new applications to Cloud.
Buyer-companies, those that use IT infrastructure for the internal needs of customers or employees, represent more than half of the computing volume that is transferred to IaaS at the moment. For them, the priorities are cost optimization and digital support of their business.
GTS Telecom is in the other half of these statistics. Provider-companies, which consume IT infrastructure primarily to deliver a service to external customers, use Cloud for reasons of flexibility and ease of infrastructure management.
Indeed, by 2015, IT service providers have represented the fastest-growing computing segment of IaaS. Moreover, this type of company spends about 10% more on IaaS-related services than IT departments from buyer-companies.
These IaaS-related services include security consulting, cost optimization services and, last but not least, support for the modernization of applications. If infrastructure modernization is the first step in Digital Transformation, we could say that service providers have made a breakthrough, even if people, infrastructure and processes were put to the test in adapting to a “remote” world.
The 2020 crisis puts the organizations that are rapidly adapting to operational changes at the forefront. Changing from working from the office to working from home, increased traffic and the need for robust remote monitoring and system control services will change, in the long run, the technological pieces that will have to be placed in a more agile world.
The investments we make for Cloud at GTS Telecom have supported us over time to provide both direct services to our customers, and also to manage the internal infrastructure we use for other services. For us, the decision to adopt Cloud has contributed to two fundamental aspects of our business: reducing “technological debt” and opening up to new partners.
Technological debt is a cost that must be paid as a result of prioritizing a rapid implementation over a long-term design. Each minute spent managing infrastructure inconsistencies, manual processes and solving incidents instead of addressing the root of the problem is an indirect cost that accumulates in this debt. And, just like a financial debt, the longer this debt reduction is postponed, the higher the interest rate is, in the form of system integration complexity, higher costs for IT operations, system fragility and the viability to meet new requirements.
The above data show that service providers are among the first to adopt a technology. For example, multicloud, a strong indicator of the adoption of Cloud by companies, is 60% more likely to be present in companies providing IT services. They gain experience by managing technology for a much wider variety of customers and eliminate or mitigate many of the “childhood problems” inherent in technological products.
It is impossible to fully eliminate this debt. However, IT service providers are much more capable to address this, as its absence represents the competitive advantage in a market that is constantly enriched with new features. Investing in an agile Cloud infrastructure is both a way to use the state-of-the-art technologies, and a way to better serve our customers.
84% of IT departments carry out infrastructure modernization projects and Cloud adoption around the needs of the applications from previous generations. Instead, the organizations in which the IT department operates as a service provider adopt a modern portfolio of services and applications.
The key link between the IT departments operating as a service provider and commercial service providers is given not by the technology or processes used, not even by the level of investments, but by the exposure to a set of partners and concepts as diverse as possible, which they could use in solving operational problems.
For us, searching for ways to reduce technical debt involves coordination, alignment and integration with other technology partners, both technically, and organizationally. The agility of the infrastructure can only be put into practice if the entire business supported by it keeps up with these changes.
For the future, Cloud will not be just a technology. Cloud is already a concept influencing relationships in organizations. The shift towards a “service” oriented thinking, which ensures an atomization of activities so that they are coupled, decoupled, changed or optimized according to the needs of a company, is reflected in the emergence of “anything as a service”, from the ordinary IaaS, PaaS or SaaS, to GaaS (Game-as-a-Service), FaaS (Farming-as-a-Service) or MaaS (Mobility-as-a-Service).
An entire ecosystem of companies specializing in DevOps, Big Data, Machine Learning, Security, High Performance Computing or Mobility revolves around the “Cloud” cloud. Each of them has, in addition to a possible solution, a possible innovation that in a few years could become a standard. But, more than anything, they are changing the way we conduct our business, allowing us to see more and more aggregated parts of the organization that can be improved as a service. And that means the beginning of agility.
GTS provides complete Cloud infrastructure solutions, by understanding the need to keep costs under control, and also to align with the existing capabilities supporting digital businesses.
- Virtual Hosting Environment provides access to significant computing resources in a “pay-as-you-go” manner
- Virtual Private Server is an easy-to-manage solution that provides a completely independent environment
- Dedicated Storage is a solution managed for accessing and storing data, for any type of connectivity
* The data in this article were provided by IDC Romania
