Author: Dale Stara

Are You Prepared for a New Normal? | Blog

This is the fifth in a series of blogs that explores a range of topics related to these issues and will naturally evolve as events unfold and facts reveal themselves. The blogs are in no way intended to provide scientific or health expertise, but rather focus on the implications and options for service delivery organizations.

These insights are based on our ongoing interactions with organizations operating in impacted areas, our expertise in global service delivery, and our previous experience with clients facing challenges from the SARS, MERS, and Zika viruses, as well as other unique risk situations.

A month ago the equity markets were hitting all-time highs, but as I write this, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down about 30%, largely due to the actions being taken to control the spread of COVID-19. Simply put, many enterprises are shutting down and pulling back – preserving cash, cancelling projects, delaying investments, and freezing hiring and/or laying off employees. We are truly living in unprecedented times.

However, through the confusion and panic, leading enterprises are demonstrating their preparedness in this difficult business environment, putting their leadership and digital business models on display. Amazon is pivoting quickly, responding to the crisis by not accepting new inventory to their warehouses other than medical and household staples, extending delivery hours and quickly hiring 100,000 additional employees to meet demand, while raising employee wages by $2/hour through April.

Other lessons from a less dominant company includes a Chinese cosmetics company, Lin Qingxuan, which was forced to close 40% of its stores in China (and 100% in Wuhan) during the peak of the crisis. The company quickly redeployed sales resources to their online presence to influence customers and drive online sales, resulting in 200% sales growth over prior year sales for the same period according to Harvard Business Review. In another example, luxury brand LVMH, which owns Louis Vuitton and Fendi, has repurposed its perfume manufacturing lines to make hand sanitizer, a move that may win the hearts of consumers as the crisis diminishes.

Clearly, this crisis demonstrates just how quickly consumer and business demands can change. If your business model is not designed to absorb these impacts, you most likely have been severely affected.  Leading enterprises are already planning for the end of this crisis. China is seeing a dramatic decrease in the number of new COVID-19 cases, factories are reopening, workers are returning to their jobs, and companies such as Dow Inc. are actually seeing increasing demand for goods in China.

If you were one of the companies on the outside looking in, now is the time to act so that the next crisis does not catch you on your heels. To fortify your business model, start by doing the following:

  • Review the alignment of your business strategy, business model, and core processes. The evolution of many enterprises focused on one area – such as client interactions – while overlooking other processes – such as such as manufacturing, supply chain, distribution, or accounting. The entire value chain must work in harmony when facing dramatic shifts in the business environment.
  • Develop your perspective of the “new normal,” and quickly make adjustments. Do your customers still want to do business with you in the manner they did before the crisis, or will they expect a new normal? Do you really understand your customers’ buying behaviors? This crisis may have a significant impact on how you conduct business in the future as you learn new habits such as remote work, virtual collaboration, enhanced e-commerce, and improved visible business tracking.
  • Understand what drives your value – outsource everything else to more capable providers. Dedicated outsourcing providers invest in their core business and strive to offer world-class services so that you can focus on your core value drivers. While outsourcing will drive cost efficiencies, you should expect it also to drive quality, flexibility, and agility of non-core processes that can better enable your business model.
  • Review the alignment of strategic third parties to your business model. Many enterprises do not understand the value of a vendor management organization (VMO) until a strategic partner fails them. A VMO ensures alignment to the business model and selection of the right providers and suppliers to ensure they can move at the speed that your business model requires.
  • Ensure your organization structure is aligned to your business model. To deploy as quickly and decisively as Amazon, Lin Qingxuan, and LVMH, you must have an organization that is innovative, empowered, aligned, and prepared. If your organization structures have not evolved as your customers have, you may want to review the reporting structures, spans and layers, and internal governance models to be certain you can address quickly changing business environments.

While this crisis has not yet peaked in many parts of the world, it is not too early to begin planning for a recovery and the new normal. Leading companies are monitoring the situation while also pushing forward with transformation and cost saving plans, incorporating changes with new learnings. This is not the first time we have been here, and it certainly will not be the last. Now is the time to not panic, but be bold and forge ahead.

Visit our COVID-19 resource center to access all our COVD-19 related insights.

Economic Forecast Calls for More Clouds | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Have you ever stopped to think why cloud computing is at the center of any IT-related discussion? In our conversations with clients, from the boardroom to the line manager, cloud is sure to enter into the discussion. Today, many of those conversations are around understanding, and to a lesser degree, implementation. But once the discussion crosses the threshold of understanding, the topic immediately goes to, “How can I get into the cloud?”

Everest Group recently held a webinar on the economics of cloud computing. There were two objectives: 1) Help clarify just how disruptive, in a good way, cloud computing is and can be; and 2) Demonstrate the economic benefits that exist in the cloud economy, and that there are those striving for this competitive advantage today.

The Hole in the Water That You Throw Money Into

One of the key economic drivers that hampers today’s data center environment is the relatively low utilization rate across its resources. Think about it like this: You’ve probably heard the old adage that owning a boat is like having a hole in the water that you throw money into. That is because the majority of boats are seldom used. (Trust me, I know, I used to own one.) The per use cost of a $25,000 (and quickly depreciating) boat that you actually use three or four times a year is quite high, and the reality is you could have rented a boat often for a fraction of the cost. The same thing is happening in your data center. If your utilization is 20 percent, or even 30 percent, you have essentially wasted 70-80 percent of your spend. That is an expensive data center.

Workload Utilizations1

Cloud computing is like that little boat rental shop tucked away in a nice cove on your favorite lake. What if you could get rid of excess capacity, better manage resource peaks and valleys, and rent public capacity when you need it, and not pay for it when you don’t?

What if we leverage public cloud flexibility1

The Economics

As you can see in the graphic below, the economics related to cloud are dramatic, and the key lies in leveraging the public cloud to pay only for what you use, eliminating the issue of excess capacity.

Public cloud options unlock extraordinary enterprise economics

There is a variety of point examples in which this is done today, with the above economics reaped. For instance, Ticket Master leverages the public cloud for large events, loading an environment to the cloud, specifically sized for each given event. The specific event may only last several hours or days, and once complete, Ticket Master takes down the environment and loads the data in its dedicated systems.

There are also enterprises and suppliers working to enable peak bursting more seamlessly. For example, eBay recently showed where they are working with Rackspace and Microsoft Azure to enable hybrid cloud bursting, allowing eBay to reduce its steady state environment (think hole in the water) from 1,900 to 800 servers, saving it $1.1 million per month.

Hybrid economics example eBay

 The Steps to Getting Started

Dedicate yourself to getting rid of your boat (or should I say boat anchor?) Begin a portfolio assessment. Understand what you have, and what is driving utilization. Consolidate applications, offload non-critical usage to the valleys, and look for ways to leverage the public/private cloud. When I unloaded my boat, I freed up capital for the more important things in life, without sacrificing my enjoyment. Doing so in your data center will allow you to take on strategic initiatives that will make you even more competitive.

Where Are Enterprises in the Public Cloud? | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced several additional services including dedicated instances of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in three flavors: on demand, one year reserved, and three year reserved. This should come as no surprise to those who have been following Amazon, as the company has been continually launching services such as CloudWatch, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and AWS Premium Support in an attempt to position itself as an enterprise cloud provider.

But will these latest offerings capture the attention of the enterprise? To date, much of the workload transitioned to the public cloud has been project-based (e.g., test and development), and peak demand computing-focused. Is there a magic bullet that will motivate enterprises to move their production environments to the public cloud?

In comparison with “traditional” outsourcing, public cloud offerings – whether from Amazon or any other provider – present a variety of real or perceived hurdles that must be overcome before we see enterprises adopt them for production-focused work:

Security: the ability to ensure, to the client’s satisfaction, data protection, data transfer security, and access control in a multi-tenant environment. While the cloud offers many advantages, and offerings continue to evolve to create a more secure computing environment, the perception that multi-tenancy equates to lack of security remains.

Performance and Availability: typical performance SLAs for the computing environment and all related memory and storage in traditional outsourcing relationships are 99.5– 99.9 percent availability, and high availability environments require 99.99 percent or higher. These availability ratings are measured monthly, with contractually agreed upon rebates or discounts kicking in if the availability SLA isn’t met. While some public cloud providers will meet the lower end of these SLAs, some use 12 months of previous service as the measurement timeline, while others define an SLA event as any outage in excess of 30 minutes, and still others use different measurements. This disparity leads to confusion and discomfort among most enterprises, and the perception that the cloud is not as robust as outsourcing services.

Compliance and Certifications: in industries that utilize highly personal and sensitive end-user customer information – such as social security number, bank account details, or credit card information – or those that require compliance in areas including HIPPA or FISMA, providers’ certifications are vital. As most public cloud providers have only basic certification and compliance ratings, enterprises must tread very carefully, and be extremely selective.

Support: a cloud model with little or no support only goes so far. Enterprises must be able to get assistance, when they need it. Some public cloud providers – such as Amazon and Terremark – do offer 24X7 support for an additional fee, but others still need to figure support into their offering equation.

Addressing and overcoming these measuring sticks will encourage enterprises to review their workloads and evaluate what makes sense to move to the cloud, and what will remain in private (or even legacy) environments.

However, enterprises’ workloads are also price sensitive, and we believe, at least today, that the public cloud is not an economical alternative for many production environments. Thus enterprise movement to the cloud could evolve one of several ways. In a hybrid cloud where the bulk of the production environment will be placed in a private cloud and peak demand burst to the public cloud. Or will increased competition, improved asset utilization and workload management continue to drive down pricing, as has happened to Amazon in both of the past two years? If so, will enterprises bypass the hybrid path and move straight to the public cloud as the economics prove attractive?

The ability to meet client demands, creating a comfort level with the cloud and the economics all play a role into how and when enterprises migrate to the cloud. The market is again at an inflection point, and it promises to be an exciting time.

Will the Sun Come out Tomorrow? | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Cloud computing promises increased flexibility, faster time to market, and drastic reduction of costs by better utilizing assets and improving operational efficiency. The cloud further promises to create an environment that is fully redundant, readily available, and very secure. Who isn’t talking about and wanting the promises of the cloud?

Today, however, Amazon’s cloud suffered significant degradation in its Virginia data center following an almost flawless year+ long record. Yes, the rain started pouring out of Amazon’s cloud at about 1:40 a.m. PT when it began experiencing latency and error rates in the east coast U.S. region.

The first status message about the problem stated:

1:41 AM PT We are currently investigating latency and error rates with EBS volumes and connectivity issues reaching EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region.

Seven hours later, as Amazon continued to feverishly work on correcting the problem, its update said:

8:54 AM PDT We’d like to provide additional color on what were working on right now (please note that we always know more and understand issues better after we fully recover and dive deep into the post mortem). A networking event early this morning triggered a large amount of re-mirroring of EBS volumes in US-EAST-1. This re-mirroring created a shortage of capacity in one of the US-EAST-1 Availability Zones, which impacted new EBS volume creation as well as the pace with which we could re-mirror and recover affected EBS volumes. Additionally, one of our internal control planes for EBS has become inundated such that it’s difficult to create new EBS volumes and EBS backed instances. We are working as quickly as possible to add capacity to that one Availability Zone to speed up the re-mirroring, and working to restore the control plane issue. We’re starting to see progress on these efforts, but are not there yet. We will continue to provide updates when we have them.

No! Say it’s not so! A cloud outage? The reality is that cloud computing remains the greatest disruptive force we’ve seen in business world since the proliferation of the Internet. What cloud computing will do to legacy environments is similar to what GPS systems did to mapmakers. And when is the last time you picked up a map?

In the future, businesses won’t even consider hosting their own IT environments. It will be an automatic decision to go to the cloud.

So why is Amazon’s outage news?

Only because it affected the 800-pound gorilla. Amazon currently has about 50 percent of the cloud market, and its competitors can only dream of this market share. When fellow cloud provider Coghead failed in 2009, did anyone know?  We certainly didn’t.  But when Amazon hiccups, everybody knows it.

Yes, the outage did affect a number of businesses. But businesses experience outages, disruptions, and degradation of service every day, regardless of whether the IT environment is legacy or next generation, outsourced or insourced.  In response, these businesses scramble, putting in place panicked recovery plans, and having their IT folk work around the clock to get it fixed…but rarely, do these service blips make the news.   So with the spotlight squarely shining on it because of its position in the marketplace, Amazon is scrambling, panicking, and working to get the problem fixed. And it will. Probably long before its clients would or could in their own environments.

Yes, it rained today, but really, it was just a little sprinkle. We believe the future for the cloud is so bright, we all need to be wearing shades.

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