Questions

1. Although we see a major move to public clouds, companies may have good reasons to keep systems on premises. Compliance is one of them. Please name another argument for keeping systems on premises.
2. The market for public clouds is dominated by a couple of major players, with AWS and Azure being recognized as leaders. They share a common history. How did these platforms start?
3. Google Anthos is described as an on-premises solution, but it differs very much from other on-premises solutions such as Azure Stack or AWS Outposts. What are the two main differences compared to the other propositions?

Further reading

• The article entitled Every business is a software business by João Paulo Carvalho, available at https://quidgest.com/en/articles/every-business-software-business/
• Multi-Cloud for Architects, by Florian Klaffenbach and Markus Klein from Packt

Considering cloud adoption from enterprise architecture

In the previous section, the changes in the enterprise markets were discussed. The modern economy is changing from ownership to subscription-based models, leading to the need for flexibility, adaptability, agility, and scalability in all layers of the enterprise, including the organization and the systems. Subscriptions come with new payment models such as pay-as-you-go (PAYG) and freemium concepts, where a basic service is delivered at no charge, but customers can enhance service with paid options. Services must be interoperable, but also capable of interacting with other systems such as payment services.

The overarching enterprise architecture as a result of this digital transformation will inevitably change. The architecture will enable faster development, targeting microservices developed by smaller teams and using cloud-native technology. In the next sections, you will learn what an architect should take into account...

Fitting cloud technology to business requirements

We are moving business into the cloud because of the required agility and, of course, to control our costs.

The next two questions will be: with what and how? Before we explore the how and basically the roadmap, we will discuss the first question: with what? A cloud adoption plan starts with business planning, which covers business processes, operations, finance, and, lastly, the technical requirements. We will have to evaluate the business demands and the IT fulfillment of these requirements.

When outsourcing contracts, the company that takes over the services performs so-called due diligence. As per its definition, due diligence is “a comprehensive appraisal of a business undertaken by a prospective buyer, especially to establish its assets and liabilities and evaluate its commercial potential” (source: https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/due_diligence). This may sound way too heavy of a process to get a cloud...

Applying the value streams of IT4IT

The problem that many organizations face is controlling the architecture of businesses at large. IT4IT is a framework that helps organizations with that. It’s complementary to TOGAF and, for this reason, is also issued as a standard by The Open Group. IT4IT is also complementary to IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), where ITIL provides best practices for IT service management. IT4IT provides the foundation to enable IT service management processes with ITIL. It is meant to align and manage a digital enterprise. It deals with the challenges that these enterprises have, such as the ever-speeding push for embracing and adopting new technology. The base concept of IT4IT consists of four value streams:

• Strategy to portfolio: The portfolio contains technology standards, plans, and policies. It deals with the IT demands of the business and maps these demands to IT delivery. An important aspect of the portfolio is project management to...

Keeping track of cloud developments—focusing on the business strategy

Any cloud architect or engineer will tell you that it’s hard to keep up with developments. Just for reference, AWS and Azure issued over 2,000 features in their respective cloud platforms in just over 1 year. These can be big releases or just some minor tweaks.

The major clouds Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Alibaba release thousands of new features every year (refer to https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2AOZQAQL&ct=220728&st=sb). These can be simple additions to existing services such as virtual machines or storage, but also new services with pre-packaged code that enable the fast deployment of web services.

But there’s much more. Think of the possibilities of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) from cloud platforms or building digital twins in the cloud. Cloud providers already also offer quantum simulation and it&...

Creating a comprehensive business roadmap

There are stores filled with books on how to create business strategies and roadmaps. This book absolutely doesn’t have any pretensions of condensing this all into just one paragraph. However, for an enterprise architect, it is important to understand how the business roadmap is evaluated:

• The mission and vision of the business, including the strategic planning of how the business will target the market and deliver its goods or services.
• Objectives, goals, and direction. Again, this includes planning, in which the business sets out when and how specific goals are met and what it will take to meet the objectives in terms of resources.
• Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). The SWOT analysis shows whether the business is doing the right things at the right time or that a change in terms of the strategy is required.
• Operational excellence. Every business has to review how it is performing...

Mapping the business roadmap to a cloud-fit strategy

Most businesses start their cloud migrations from traditional IT environments, although a growing number of enterprises are already quite far into cloud-native development too. We don’t have to exclude either one; we can plan to migrate our traditional IT to the cloud, while already developing cloud-native applications in the cloud itself. Businesses can have separate cloud tracks, running at different speeds. It makes sense to execute the development of new applications in cloud environments using cloud-native tools. Next, the company can also plan to migrate its traditional systems to a cloud platform. There are a number of ways to do that. We will be exploring these, but also look at drivers that start these migrations. The key message is that it’s likely that we will not be working with one roadmap. Well, it might be one roadmap, but one that is comprised of several tracks with different levels of complexity and...

Summary

In this chapter, we explored the methodologies that are used to analyze enterprise or business strategies and mapped these to a cloud technology roadmap. We also learned that it is close to impossible to keep track of all the new releases and features that are launched by cloud and technology providers. We need to determine what our business goals and objectives are and define a clear architecture that is as future-proof as possible, yet agile enough to adopt new features if the business demands this.

Business agility must be the focus of a modern, digital enterprise. Business drivers are derived from financial, customer, product, and internal objectives, but these are rapidly changing in the current markets. One of the major trends is the upcoming subscription-based economy that forces businesses to create agile organizations, and systems that are able to respond to these changes quickly.

Enterprise architectures, using frameworks such as IT4IT, help us to design...

Questions

1. How would you define business agility?
2. What would be the first thing to define if we created a business roadmap?
3. In this chapter, we discussed cloud transformation strategies. Rehost and replatform are two of them. Name two more.
4. In this chapter, we identified major developments in the cloud market. What is recognized as being the main change in business models that can be facilitated by using cloud-native technology?

Further reading

• How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy, by Michael E. Porter (Harvard Business Review)