What’s Next for Cloud in 2023? Three Top Trends
In 2023, enterprises will continue to spend aggressively on cloud technologies and business models to bring innovation and value to their end users.
Click on the question below that speaks to where you are in your cloud transformation.
This might look like building a business case for cloud – the “why cloud” for your specific business. Or, you may have that down, but still need to figure out your cloud orchestration - how to integrate your cloud strategy with your operating model, what skillsets you need to accomplish goals, how to choose which model (hybrid, private, public) suits your business goals, and which provider(s) can help you. Click here to learn how ISG can help.
Stop us if this sounds familiar: you’ve migrated some workloads to the cloud, but now you’re facing major silos, budget issues, unmanaged capacity, and a lack of transparency, resiliency and skillsets to take full advantage of your cloud offerings. Are you only using cloud for storage and compute, and want to unlock value with cloud native services? Are you considering if you need a cloud center of excellence? Click here to learn how ISG can help.
You’ve made it – you’ve lifted, shifted, scaled and created a cloud center of excellence. But now there’s demand to provide service-based IT to your enterprise. Plus, you're struggling to stay ahead of managing spend, demand, capacity and consumption. Above and beyond all of that, you must show tangible ROI of your cloud investments – so how can you monetize to innovate new revenue opportunities? Click here to learn how ISG can help.
From Designing a Business Case to Your Cloud Orchestration Strategy
Every enterprise today feels the pressure – the shared infrastructure has been neglected in the rush to satisfy the digital imperatives of individual business areas. What are your options to modernize applications and data centers? What are the right SaaS/ERP systems, cloud/IaaS/PaaS solutions, networks approach? And how should you approach system integration with your legacy systems and digital upgrades?
ISG can help you create a business-value oriented "why cloud" case specific to your needs. We'll work with you to build a digital cloud strategy to determine what can be sourced to get your infrastructure up to expectations faster and more effectively. Along the way, we can help you find opportunities to optimize costs and fund your digital initiatives.
Unlocking Cloud Beyond Storage & Compute Capabilities
How do you achieve a consistent customer experience and highly reliable cloud services to meet your business needs? Our services help you accelerate your overall cloud adoption, modernization or migration. We can help you create a cloud center of excellence to do just that.
Whether you need to build new, cloud-based apps or transform your architecture to transition to a new operating model, ISG has actionable strategies, easy-to-customize, proven migration templates and experience to ensure your success. Plus, we account for cultural change, migration governance, organizational change management as part of our transformations.
Modernize your sourcing strategy for cloud tech, system integrators and managed services providers with our collaborative, joint solutioning throughout the downselect and selection process. ISG helps you achieve cost transparency, govern cloud decision-making, and track reporting, metrics and measurement via Cloud FinOps to optimize your cloud spend and usage.
Achieve Innovation and ROI to Support Your Business Objectives
We incorporate predictive cognitive analytics solutions to understand, monitor and optimize your cloud spending and performance. But beyond that, we're a trusted partner for innovative design, solutioning and sourcing of new market opportunities leveraging your cloud investments.
Independently validate, verify and adjust your cloud scaling strategy and ensure alignment between your investments and value realized by measuring project costs up front and along the way with our Project-Estimation-as-a-Service offering. Our goal is to help you achieve single-pane cloud spend management, service-based IT, and new revenue from cloud innovation.
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Learn MoreVirtualization led by hyperscalers has accelerated among business and technology stakeholders globally. Heavy business reliance on virtualized environments for various workloads, including missioncritical applications, has made virtualization mainstream in the current IT market. Infrastructure modernization through virtualization has enabled enterprise clients to accrue the benefits of scalable network and storage capacity. In the pursuit of digital transformation, enterprises worldwide expedite the end-to-end digitalization of their business processes. Google Cloud, one of the leading hyperscalers, facilitates enterprises to gain a competitive edge through agility, flexibility and elastic scalability, translating into an elevated end-user experience. Service providers build their unique capabilities and functionality on GCP, which is leading the digital transformation space with the advanced technology required for redesigning and refining its relationships with product vendors, global system integrators (GSIs) and enterprise clients. The partner ecosystem comprises entities that establish a symbiotic relationship with listed products and offerings on GCP. Google and its partners rely on each other’s inherent expertise and technology prowess. While Google incorporates advanced partner services into its platforms, GSIs leverage the vast reach and innumerable benefits offered by Google to cater to enterprises’ client needs. By utilizing their extensive industry expertise, consulting partners ensure value generation to an enterprise through joint capabilities.
In the last four quarters, enterprises marginally restricted their spend on cloud technologies and business models to bring innovation and value to their end users. They are benefiting from using cloud computing environments and leveraging cutting-edge technologies like AI, analytics and RPA, which are speeding the rate and pace of technological improvements and UX. Hybrid cloud has become the norm in the last few years, with private cloud having the lion’s share. With the growing demand for hybrid cloud solutions, IT infrastructure environments have become more complex and difficult to manage. Enterprises are now more open to outsourcing these operations to service providers that have significant expertise in managing hybrid cloud infrastructure for enterprises in multiple industries. Some of the key variables influencing outsourcing decisions are the integration and consolidation of data centers, server performance, virtualization, containerization, governance and compliance, downtime and data loss. ISG observed that due to inflation and several economic and political downturns, enterprises were seen spending less or holding or pushing their infrastructure transformation engagements to the next year. They are more cautious and strategic in their outsourcing decisions to manage their costs effectively in this volatile economic scenario. This is corroborated by our ISG Index numbers, present in the Introduction part of the report.
Microsoft plays a pivotal role in many businesses’ digital transformation strategies and is one of the world’s leading enterprise technology vendors. Its products form the backbone of digital transformation for companies across the U.S. As a U.S.-based company, Microsoft generates half its revenues from its home country and has a strong historical footing in the region, especially among larger firms. The tech titan subdivides its offerings into three main pillars: Microsoft 365, which includes Office 365 and Windows; Dynamics 365, a business application suite; and Azure, a hyperscale cloud platform that operates globally. Power Platform, a more recent addition to the Microsoft portfolio, is a low-code development platform that enables citizen developers to build apps and workflows, thus extending the capabilities of existing portfolios.
As businesses are becoming software and data-driven, they need an infrastructure base that can adapt to the changing market conditions, be managed as a hybrid model and to always be accessible. Most data center outsourcing engagements now have elements of private/hybrid cloud and intuitive cloud management and cognitive platforms enablement.
In today’s world, to enable key business initiatives, cloud adoption plays a central and leading role in ensuring enterprise continuity. Enterprises are dependent on IT’s ability to deliver technology and solutions that provide differentiation in the market. The public cloud service market continues to grow as observed in previous years. This is mainly due to the acceleration of digital business transformation programs undertaken by enterprises to grow their businesses and improve customer experience (CX). Cloud migration and application modernization represent the leading enterprise initiatives. Data and analytics come third on the priority list, with cloud governance interest increasing in enterprises.
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Our take on being a cloud advisor is to be an independent, unbiased advisor to our clients. Our framework addresses four main areas: creating a future vision for your cloud usage, building actionable operating models for adopting/migrating to cloud, designing how you manage and operate your day-to-day cloud usage, and defining your scaling strategy to achieve value at scale. All of this is supported by a foundation of cloud security and cloud benchmarking to ensure your investments are protected and to measure results and ROI along the way. Learn More
You’ve probably heard of private, public and hybrid clouds – this refers to your deployment model. The deployment model has a significant impact on the degree to which it meets the NIST characteristics. There are several key cloud providers for each. For private cloud, there are offerings from HP, VMWare, Openstack, Citrix, ServiceNow, IBM and others. Some public cloud providers include Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Salesforce, Amazon Web Service (AWS) and others. Hybrid cloud deployments leverage both private and public cloud models. Learn More
We see many in the market beginning to look for answers on how to better their cloud security architecture and strategy, how to leverage a modern enterprise network to better enable cloud, how to manage a cloud partner ecosystem, and more. Contact us to speak with an advisor about our insights.