The only conversation I’m having with financial industry customers  is about how to move to the cloud. About a year ago, many customers in the vertical were not ready to discuss cloud because of regulatory and compliance, business disruption, and security concerns; however, that is changing. Many organizations have either spun off parallel division to evaluate cloud or start small pilots to get their feet wet. This article isn’t meant to debate if one should move to the cloud or not. The Cloud evolution has occurred and it’s no longer a question, but rather an explanation of different things you need to be aware of for a successful journey to the cloud!

Moving to the cloud requires a broad spectrum of knowledge spanning infrastructure (compute, storage, network), data management/architecture, data and application integration, packaged application or COTS,  DevOps, security, and management in the cloud. An architectural approach is key to easily identify gaps and avoid “gotchas” since most of the companies are just starting the journey. It is like ten people in a circle are trying to describe an elephant. Each will describe it differently depending on which angle they are viewing the elephant from 🙂 Based on several financial company interviews or cloud strategy discovery sessions, here is the list of top 10 questions you need to ask yourself as you start your journey to the cloud!

  1. Business Drivers – What do you want to achieve by moving to the cloud? The cost shouldn’t be the only factor. Some of the common components are time-to-market, agility, user productivity, or operational efficiency. Define the objective to measure the cloud success.
  2. People – How should an organizational structure change to adopt the cloud strategy? Deployment in the cloud is different as some of the roles and responsibilities shift to the cloud provider. Depending on the services – IaaS, PaaS or SaaS – the roles and responsibilities will differ. Start with a RACI document to understand what organizational changes will be required.
  3. Regulatory compliance and security – What are the regulatory requirements you need to adhere to? For example, a financial company may have to meet Dodd-Frank, SOX,  PCI-DSS requirements. Some of the new regulations for financial industry include Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), GDPR and “23 NYC RR Part 500“. Crosscheck these requirements with the cloud provider. You may need to integrate your existing identity management with cloud and provide same or higher level of security.
  4. Cloud Strategy – Is the strategy to go private, public or Hybrid cloud? To date, there are a handful of customers who have moved their entire data centers to public cloud. Most customers are adopting phased hybrid cloud strategy to identify a few applications they can start to move into the cloud. This may involve application rationalization or replace old legacy applications with cloud applications(SaaS). Most seem to have hybrid cloud strategy, which causes the effects mentioned in points five and six. The second part of the strategy is determining the service model – IaaS, PaaS or SaaS. PaaS and SaaS, for example, offer more automation and lower accountability on the hands of the customer. Finally, multi-vendor cloud strategy is becoming more common to support different workloads, which results in having to integrate applications across the clouds.
  5. Integrate – How do you plan to integrate applications running on multiple clouds such as WorkDay, SalesForce or Oracle SaaS? Keep in mind, you may need to integrate on-premise and cloud applications.  An integration framework needs to be in place to successfully implement the cloud strategy. For example, a customer may use Oracle’s Integration Cloud Service to integrate SalesForce with Oracle ERP or E-business Suite. However, the way you amalgamate your data and applications today may not be sufficient and organizations may have to rethink their integration strategy.
  6. Management – How should you monitor and manage the cloud? If it is a hybrid cloud, is there single pane of glass or multiple panes? Your cloud provider has cloud tools to manage and monitor in the cloud such as Oracle Management Cloud or AWS CloudWatch, which will need to be integrated with your existing tools. For example, it may need to work with SCOM or HP Openview, interface with ServiceNow or Remedy, and so forth.
  7. Development  Strategy – How should development change with cloud strategy? Will old applications be migrated to container based? When moving to the cloud, older applications can start to leverage DevOps.  New applications may be developed native on the cloud or polyglot. This really depends on what type of applications an organization has and requires an in-dept evaluation. You might be able to lift n’ shift your legacy ERP applications and extend it in the cloud with newer technologies such as cloud native or Polyglot.
  8. Network Connectivity – What will the connectivity to public cloud look like? What are the bandwidth and latency requirements? Most cloud providers give you the choice of Public Internet, VPN, or private connectivity from your data center to the public cloud: Oracle’s FastConnect, Microsoft ExpressRoute and Amazon’s Direct Connect.  Once you know the requirements and who your network provider is today, determine what will be required on your end (on-premise) for connectivity.
  9. Data Architecture – How will the way you collect, store, arrange, and integrate data change? Data model, policies, and rules that govern your data may change for the cloud because this may be an opportunity to move some of the data to Hadoop, enable data science labs, and do data visualization or discovery in the cloud.
  10. Migration – What’s the best way to migrate your applications to Cloud? Is it going to be lift and shift? Specifically, when you have hundreds of servers to migrate, you need ways to cut down the migration effort and time:
    • Move your VMs to the Cloud as it is. For example, Oracle Ravello can import the VMWare VMs directly into Oracle Cloud.
    • Use templates or orchestration tools to simplify provisioning of the services such as Oracle Orchestration, AWS Cloud Formation, or Terraform.
    • Replication technologies can help move the data to the cloud; for example, you can use Oracle Data Guard to move data to Oracle Cloud. Alternatively, one can use Oracle Cloud Backup service to backup a database and restore it in the cloud. There are a few other options available depending on the size and availability of your data.
    • Many data protection technologies can be used similarly to migrate data and application to the cloud.

The takeaway is that you need a team to work together to successfully move to the cloud. To paint the big picture spanning multiple pillars, an Enterprise Architect would be essential.   Unless you’re simply taking a few servers from development environments to the cloud, you need to think through these ten things for a large scale deployment. In the next article, I will layout the Oracle Cloud and Amazon Cloud services by architectural layers. Meanwhile, check out Top 10 List for Success in the Cloud.

The opinion and views of this article are my own and not of Oracle Corporation’s.