Escape legacy, embrace the cloud
Cloud technologies are vaunted for their ability to transform costs and build business flexibility. Shifting to the cloud is today’s essential IT priority, enabling organisations to be more competitive through fast time-to-market and sustainable costs.
Yet rushing headlong into cloud adoption to move away from legacy systems could create new challenges and even increase costs. Avoiding the pitfalls calls for technology and business transformation strategies to be integrated. There can be no disconnects between managers with the business vision and engineers choosing the right technology for the journey from legacy IT to cloud efficiency.
It all begins at the end
Getting ready for the cloud begins with an analysis of what the outcomes should be. These could include the desired customer experience, overcoming barriers to innovation, business growth objectives or any other criterion. The final deployment also needs to provide access to legacy systems and enable you to be nimbler than your competition. When these requirements are set, the right solution can then be designed, built and put into operation. It’s essential to understand and navigate the growing ecosystem of cloud technologies – hyperscale, containers, orchestration software, microservices architecture, cloud native apps, cloud-based enterprise applications, cloud security and more. That demands skills many organisations lack. NTT DATA can help plan, build, manage and secure your cloud deployment. As your trusted partner, in cloud and business transformation, our long experience and global expertise will help you set and achieve ambitious goals.
Successful transformation is guided by business strategy
Any cloud transformation project must ensure the outcome supports the organisation’s business strategy and ambitions. We offer a wide range of cloud application and infrastructure consulting, system integration, architecture design and deployment services. There is no off-the-shelf solution for cloud transformation. That’s why NTT DATA takes a pragmatic view, expending time and effort to fully comprehend each organisation’s business and technology situation.
Armed with an in-depth understanding of your business strategy NTT DATA creates a cloud transformation programme from its range of proven advisory services, engineering services and managed services. Typically, these services are applied across three stages – Cloud Readiness, Journey to the Cloud and Cloud Management.
Cloud Readiness
Planning a move to the cloud must encompass the strategy and motivation behind the project to guide the migration of legacy on-premises applications and infrastructure to the cloud. This stage provides a detailed understanding of the skills needed, security requirements, most suitable cloud structure, cost of transformation, timelines and the cost to run the future cloud deployment.
Journey to the Cloud
It’s essential to set out a clear roadmap for the migration of applications to the cloud. This involves creating a Return on Investment (RoI) for each application, and identifying the skills, tools, architecture and networks required to achieve that RoI. Once in place, we apply a proven methodology with extensive automation that accelerates deployment in the cloud while maintaining the flexibility to adjust to changing priorities. All of which reduces management time and costs, enabling resources to be refocused on innovation.
Cloud Management
To support day-to-day operations, NTT DATA Managed Services apply monitoring, automation and advanced management methodologies to secure, maintain and optimise cloud environments. As well as ensuring security, governance and compliance, our proactive approach minimises costs while meeting your performance needs. Full transparency is provided through comprehensive dashboards and clear reporting on all services, whether manual or automated.
Cloud native is ready for mainstream adoption
Cloud native approaches offer a fresh route to business transformation in the cloud. Choosing a hybrid multi-cloud architecture and building systems in a cloud native way enables innovation at pace and creates substantial cost benefits.
Continuing to use existing applications without incurring the time, cost and risk of a total replacement is an attractive option for many organisations, especially in the public sector.
However, a straightforward ‘lift and shift’ of infrastructure to the cloud, whether private, public or hybrid, is unlikely to deliver the required cost transformation. Simply creating virtualised replicas of existing legacy applications fails to achieve the cloud’s full potential.
Instead, redeveloping applications from the ground up to be cloud native means they are optimised for modern, dynamic environments such as public, private and hybrid clouds. While initially more costly, this approach will quickly reap huge cost saving and competitive benefits. In effect the cloud becomes a business differentiator, not just a data centre.
Cloud Native Modernisation
NTT DATA offers several services to help organisations adopt, monitor and manage cloud native technology and make innovation a built-in part of their processes. Organisations can start to adopt cloud native, using existing data centre assets, then move to the cloud as and when desired. This approach takes advantage of the maturity and security of on-premises tools to achieve cloud native power without undue complexity.
Escape from Legacy
Initiatives to move away from legacy systems typically focus on lowering costs. The challenge is doing this successfully while retaining control of and efficiently managing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and database systems like SAP and Oracle.
NTT DATA offers services that help organisations to identify opportunities for modernisation and provide the framework and accelerators to achieve it. We provide managed services for Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and SAP migration.
Tame cloud complexity with a trusted partner
Choosing an expert partner and using effective tools for making and deploying software leads to more secure, more successful cloud-enabled business transformation. NTT DATA has long experience in cloud transformation.
NTT DATA has helped multiple organisations around the world to intelligently adopt the cloud. We constantly strive to bring innovation to business transformation programmes in a range of industry sectors.
Lack of skills? No barrier
For example, we address the lack of skills typical in many organisations by applying a method known as pair-programming. When running a project, we ensure the client’s engineering personnel are involved at all points and work in parallel with us every step of the way. This means work can start immediately without waiting for your staff to be trained, while at the end of the project your own people will have gained the skills needed to operate critical systems.
Need the right tools? Ready and waiting
Using our global reach, we have analysed a huge range of projects to understand the reasons for success, as well as the potential pitfalls of managing containerized applications in a hybrid multi-cloud environment. Based on this insight and our own experience in projects, we select the best tools for the entire transformation journey, no matter how complex. With NTT DATA as your trusted cloud transformation partner, the complex becomes simple.
