Connecting the dots between cloud maturity and business outcomes.
Many studies estimate cloud adoption rates, but are organizations getting real value from the cloud? Concerns about cloud cost overruns suggest there is room for improvement.
In the Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report, “managing the cloud spend” topped security as the No. 1 cloud challenge. Organizations exceeded their public cloud budget by 18 percent on average. Survey respondents estimated that 28 percent of their cloud spending is wasted. Why?
A separate study conducted by Forrester Consulting offers insight. The third annual State of the Cloud Strategy Survey found that organizations with high levels of cloud maturity were less likely to say they were wasting their cloud spend. Almost two-thirds (62 percent) of high-maturity organizations increased their cloud spending in the past year. Just 38 percent of low-maturity organizations did so.
What Is Cloud Maturity?
Organizations with high cloud maturity take a best-practice approach to implementing and managing their cloud environment. These best practices extend to cloud infrastructure, security, networking and applications as well as operations. High-maturity organizations implement these practices throughout the enterprise.
As organizations become more mature, they can focus more of their IT spending on innovation and strategy and less on routine, day-to-day tasks. They improve capabilities and maximize efficiency by implementing consistent cloud designs and solutions. They gain the ability to change and deploy cloud services in near real time to satisfy new and evolving business demands. As standardized services are implemented across the organization, the quality of those services improves.
What is the Cloud Maturity Model?
The IDC Cloud Maturity Model is similar to the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) Cloud Maturity Model (CMM). The ODCA CMM is used to assess an organization’s maturity with regard to business and technology capabilities in specific domains and across cloud service models.
There are five progressive levels of cloud maturity in the OCDA CMM:
- Initial, Ad Hoc. Cloud readiness and potential cloud services analyzed. There is limited cloud adoption as awareness of cloud computing grows.
- Repeatable, Opportunistic. Cloud adoption processes are established. An approach is defined but only applied opportunistically, as multiple approaches are still used. Initial capability gains are achieved.
- Defined, Systematic. Efficiency is improved as a documented cloud adoption approach is widely accepted and followed.
- Measured, Measurable. Cloud-based applications are deployed manually to support business needs. Cloud capabilities are measured and managed, leading to increases in velocity and quality.
- Optimized. This is the highest level of maturity achieved by organizations leveraging an interoperable and open cloud. Assets are proactively maintained, and inter-cloud operations are being explored. Metrics show incremental capability gains.
With greater maturity comes more sophisticated, optimized cloud usage. Users can access multiple cloud services with a single set of credentials across an interconnected and interoperable cloud infrastructure. Open standards facilitate faster adoption. However, not all organizations require the same level of cloud maturity or will take the same approach to cloud maturity. That depends on their specific objectives.
How is Cloud Maturity Achieved?
The goal of the ODCA CMM is to help organizations achieve the full benefits of cloud services according to their needs and goals. The first step is to determine an organization’s ability to adopt and integrate cloud services. The second step is to benchmark the organization against other cloud adopters in its industry. The third step is to create a roadmap for effective, structured cloud integration to ensure alignment with specific business needs and use cases.
The CMM will also show how usage of cloud services may change, and how the organization can adopt cloud services to meet future goals in a way that satisfies governance and control requirements. This information is used to optimize operations, establish and implement best practices, and choose the right cloud solutions and deployment models.
Conclusion
Organizations that are taking full advantage of the cloud have made the leap from reducing costs to creating competitive advantages. The ODCA CMM is a valuable tool for assessing cloud maturity and creating a plan for maximizing the benefits of cloud integration.
