Integrating cloud-native architecture with innovation core

Establishing innovation core capability 

Establishing “innovation core” capability means getting the core services deployed successfully and in a shared model to unlock the desired benefits for most innovation opportunities.

• Platform foundations: Service security, access control, platform governance, DevOps and automation, containment and connectivity, monitoring, and logging are some of the key domains of cloud foundations. These domains need to be bound by an operating model that provides capabilities related to transformation, governance, and engineering. Though a daunting task, getting the governance aspects correct is critical to success. Companies should establish a cloud business office for strategic guidance, cost control, and business value assurance, as well as a center of excellence for architectural quality assurance, cloud service management, and technology innovation to address potential pitfalls during the cloud adoption journey. 
  
• Enterprise data lake: An enterprise data lake provides opportunities for the holistic mining of data for greater insight and business value by removing the constraints of siloed data warehouses, back offices, and line-of-business systems. A data lake paradigm fits well into cloud-native characteristics of hyperscale storage and horizontally scalable processing, leading major cloud service providers to offer various options for data lake implementation.
• Modern compute services: A modern application platform should be considered as part of a cloud-native strategy, as it delivers the compute capabilities of the innovation core. With the evolution of virtualization, containerized compute, and serverless architecture, a modern application platform or containerization capability is better interpreted as any service that offers compute efficiency, scale, and resiliency, regardless of underpinning technology. As cloud service providers look to simplify the compute stack and its underlying operation, overt reliance on docker and Kubernetes will get abstracted over time. Thus, organizations need to consider modern application platforms. 

Potential constraints and steps to overcome

Applying innovation core thinking in cloud strategy can be challenging. Here are a few of the recurring pitfalls observed among organizations throughout their cloud adoption journey, along with prescriptive recommendations for how to overcome them.

• Shared services are often perceived as bureaucratic or too costly. Organizations can structure agile and highly interoperable foundational services to cover cross-cutting concerns in a cloud-native fashion. This will remove barriers to adoption so that critical control requirements can be rapidly implemented, such as identity and access management and data governance.
• Misunderstandings or miscommunications stretching across people, processes, and technology in innovation delivery frequently result in project failures. It is wise to preapprove defined usage scenarios to steer solution design groups toward better architecture decisions and promote efficient use of cloud-native design patterns with consistent and predictable operational characteristics.
• Siloed solution design and inadequate collaboration across streams result in multiple disparate solutions and unnecessary technology proliferation. Cloud adopters need to diligently select fit-for-purpose, reusable solution components that are aligned to enterprise IT principles and architectural quality goals to reduce technology proliferation, lower the operational complexity and cost, and reduce operational risk.
• Certain infrastructure domains demand some fresh thinking, and several organizations do not possess the requisite platform engineering skills aligned with new paradigms of cloud operations. Businesses might need to reskill the talent on the engineering team to find more appropriate, cloud-aligned ways to manage risk, especially regarding information security control implementation.
• Platform engineering teams find roadblocks when they want to transition their healthy “proof-of-concept” portfolio to an operational mode. This is largely due to limited access given by information security, data privacy, or risk management business lines. To ease such transition, it is important for core services to be fully approved (governed) by all stakeholders and to be of the desired architectural quality for current and future operations.
• Though there is a steep price tag attached to cloud adoption and migration, organizations should consider cloud-native services that are scalable on demand and ephemeral, giving increased cost-savings potential and fine-grained service composition. Innovation core allows financial planning by leveraging the analysis tool sets available, such as tagging, anomaly checks, and automatic decommissioning, as part of the service definition landscape.

Last word

By considering the latest in leading cloud-native approaches and their impact across the cloud services landscape, organizations can achieve their technology innovation targets. Establishing core innovation capability, as opposed to simply lifting and shifting workloads to cloud, can provide significant benefits and help organizations unlock the true benefits of cloud.  To learn more about this topic, please read our full report, “Awakening architecture with cloud innovation core” and “A new framing for cloud innovation.”