Return on cloud –why a razor-sharp
focus on management
is keyBy Prof Sally Eaves, CEOTomorrow’s Tech TodayStart2ContentsIntroduction

3

Eight key trends impacting digital transformation

4

The cloud catalyst

5Challenges to opportunities

6

The management imperative

7

Tips to support management optimization

8

Good cloud management is the key to cloud that delivers a return!

10

3

There’s been a big surge incloud adoption across almost
all sectors and geographies
And of course, that’s driving a similar
surge in spending on cloud services.
That includes spending on both thehardware and components that
underpin all the aspects of cloud, aswell as professional and managed
services needed to make cloud function
successfully. Add it all together and it’sestimated that spending is poised
to surpass $1 trillion in 2024.
Cloud is a priority for many organizations,and one they are willing to invest
significant sums into getting right.
That’s because users welcome theagility and flexibility that it brings
to their everyday, working lives.

But managing a fluid set of platforms
is a challenge. It takes time and effort
to ensure they work together properly.
That’s vital if spending on cloud is togenerate a return.
To do that, it’s important to understandthat the cloud is not a singular staticentity. Far from it, it is in fact a fluid
collection of technologies, connections,platforms, and services, with an arrayof different data sources and interactions.
Simply, it’s complex. And that complexity
brings with it a variety of options
and possibilities that have been key
to navigating, negating, or indeed
enabling key business and societal
changes that are happening aroundthe world right now.

4Eight key trends
impacting digitaltransformationThe progress of digital transformation acrossthe world is being impacted by eight keytrends. They’re well known, but cometogether neatly when talking about cloud:And if that’s not all, there’s theclear and significant effect (oftennegative) of today’s increasinglyinterconnected and disrupted world.

1. A major shift in customer
engagement personalization

A world that’s characterized bydiverse vectors of change including
the lasting after-effects of thepandemic, widespread supply chain
vulnerabilities, the rapid escalationof ever-changing security threats,a seemingly endless cycleof natural disasters, and mostrecently, the seismic effectsof rapid global inflation.

2. The central importance ofgaining and retaining digital trust
3. The transition to ‘As-a-Service’
4. Technology convergence
5. The rapid expansion of complianceand regulatory demands
6. The application of digitalplatforms for agile business
7. A shift in platform users, notably citizen
developers, non-IT trained employees
who are encouraged to learn how tocreate business applications
8. The rise of the ‘composable’ or modular
enterprise as an innovation strategy(Gartner 2022)

We all need to deal with the factthat social, economic and market
conditions can change quite literally
whilst we sleep. And sleep we must,
but the cloud and data never do!

5

The cloud catalyst
Activating data for impact

The acceleration in cloud computing has helped connect
people and society across the globe. Through data, fueling themost popular workplace tools and resources today, and giving
rise to competing but similar approaches like Data Lakes,
Data Warehouses and Lake Houses.
It has made more data available and supported its exchange,enhanced agility, elasticity and scalability, advanced
communication, collaboration, and cohesiveness – all fostering
innovation, enabling ‘work-from-anywhere’ and accelerating
all important cost effectiveness and time to value.
Cloud also represents an opportunity to make the mostof emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine
Learning, Blockchain, and Advanced Data Analytics without theneed for substantial upfront investment. That, coupled with theability to utilize and optimize data stored on premise, in the cloud,or as part of a hybrid model, has literally helped change where,when, and how we make decisions. Supporting this further is therise of Cloud Native – the architectures and technologies built
to take advantage of cloud power and capabilities.

6

Challenges toopportunities
Architecting,integrating andmanaging cloudWith timely data-driven decisions at
a premium there are still barriers to address.
From data being too distributed or wrangling
disparate sources, right through to disruption inmigrations, and taking too long to either movecritical data or analyze it (WAN disco 2022).
Additional examples include broken data
pipelines after operational database changes
and lack of holistic visibility and integration of
IT infrastructure, especially when managing thevast variety of technologies and data sources.
Beyond this comes concerns around security
risks. The scope, scale, and sophisticationof cyber security threats have reachedunprecedented levels. That’s especially trueof ransomware. The key factors include widelydistributed endpoints, increasing bad actor
collaboration, and ‘invisible’ threats fromstate actors. And the adoption of multiple
security tools, techniques and vendors
within organizations can actually result indata noise and decision paralysis. They add
to the already exceedingly high workloads
of operation teams.

Of course, cloud security tools are richin features, but ensuring that they are properly
configured and managed takes a team ofskilled and experienced experts.
So, taken together these factors serve to create
the complexity that can easily undermine yourresilience, agility, and security. Naturally, thatmakes it difficult for organizations to create
and maintain an accurate and holistic viewof risk across the enterprise (cio.com)1.
Levels of cloud waste (Flexera 2022)2 areanother challenge. According to Statista,organizations worldwide estimate they waste
30% of their cloud spending. Legacy methodsof budgeting, purchasing, and tracking cloud
spend simply do not work.
Talent gap challenges are also key to address,
coupled with the team demands of building
and maintaining a cloud data warehouse orequivalent. With many companies today lacking
the internal skills and capabilities to effectively
optimize their cloud management, looking
externally to trusted experts can makea massive impact to your ‘return on cloud.’

1 https://www.cio.com/article/350332/how-to-achieve-a-holistic-integrative-and-proactive-view-of-risk.html
2 https://info.flexera.com/CM-REPORT-State-of-the-Cloud

7

The management imperative
How to maximize cloud value
Excellent cloud management can make all the difference
to your cloud strategy with a constant, consistent, trusted,and detailed approach key. This is where Fujitsu’s Cloud
Management Service (FCMS) becomes a good option.
FCMS is always active, almost invisible, always responsive,and mostly automated, delivering benefits across thethree pillars of agility, resilience, and compliance.
Freeing your people to actively support your businessthrough delightful experiences and service, empoweringothers, fostering innovation… the list just goes on!
Here are the core benefits in focus, underpinned by thevalues of co-creation, constant cooperation, and trust.

Agility
Because FCMS takes care of your cloud infrastructure’s
end-to-end management and optimization, you’re free
to focus on creating and deploying new applications
and solutions quicker. FCMS ensures that all elementsof your cloud infrastructure are working together
properly, and are orchestrated and visible. And theuse of automated tools means that issues can beproactively identified and resolved quickly. Relying on
Fujitsu’s experts enhances your cloud’s effectivenessby ensuring it is ‘self-healing’ and can constantly
support your business.
Resilience
Constant and detailed cloud management
is the catalyst for resilience, embedding attention
to updates, patches, outages, and cyber security
protection by design. With FCMS, the combinationof integrated technology and automated tools
alongside deep expertise is a key differentiator.
Compliance
Ensuring the right guidelines and guardrails arein place across systems and networks and utilizing
AI to automate protection and reduce the noiseof regulation overload. FCMS enables a compliance‘hygiene’ foundation to be embedded by design,
covering critical aspects such as patching andupgrades, which were often ‘pushed back’
during the pandemic.

8Tips to support
management optimization:
Ensuring cloud value
In my opinion, when you work in partnership with
Fujitsu’s Cloud Management Service you will be better
placed to achieve a good return on cloud value by
following these recommendations:1
Trust the data your cloud givesyou and apply it - If your data
demonstrates an over subscription
on your compute configuration, don’t
delay on making changes. Trust thedata! Cut back and do it immediately.
Optimize your cloud spend because
as fast as you can ramp down, you
can ramp up just as quickly, quite
literally in minutes.

2Start simple and carefully
allocate resources - For example
using reserved instances and making
longer term commitments or spot
instances for more dynamic
workloads, can enable significant
cost savings. A good mantra is tothink Z-I-O – Zombie, Idle,Overprovisioned.

3 https://secureoutreach.unisys.com/SinkorSoarSixKeystoOptimizingYourCloudInvestment

3• Zombie resources – Nobody is using
them. But if you don’t have a tagging
strategy you may not even know.
• Idle resources – If you don’t use
compute 24/7 (for example a testenvironment) you should take it
down and not leave it idle andsimply adding to cloud costs.
• Overprovisioned resources –reducing an instance by one sizemeans you can cut costs by aneye watering 50%. (Unisys 2021)3

Cloud visibility enables the bestdecisions - Cloud optimization tools
provide more visibility for tracking
expenses with dashboards andreports based on personalized
criteria, alongside consolidation andplanning of budgets month-overmonth or over the entire year.

94Use tools which afford active intelligence instantly Establish a Cloud FinOps; that’s an operational frameworkand cultural shift which brings technology, finance, and thebusiness together to drive financial accountability thathelps leverage cloud transformation to achieve cloud value.
You also need to practice and apply Cloud Optimization andAI enabled tooling to reduce manual efforts, for example
predicting and automating the rightsizing of your instancesconsidering seasonal variations. Auto scaling and selfhealing infrastructure also helps to take the human outof the loop wherever possible and appropriate to do so.

5
Cloud management enables sustainability benefits Active Intelligence on Cloud Consumption can afford
broader ESG impact notably reducing data waste
and energy consumption. Ensure these metrics
are integrated into daily operations to demonstrateshared values benefits and secure further
buy-in to your cloud investment.

6Think beyond infrastructure - Rationalize your application
portfolio, modernize applications, and adopt cloud native
paradigms for your cloud transformation to enablesuperior business outcomes and cost savings alike.

Good cloud management is thekey to cloud that delivers a return!
To optimize the value from any multi-cloud investment demands an effective
management approach, applied both strategically and operationally.
With most organizations not having the people or the technology resources
to do all that is needed across Agility, Resilience and Compliance to optimize
business, technical and societal outcomes. Working with a trusted external
partner can make all the difference, as exemplified by the benefits ofFujitsu’s Cloud Management Service (FCMS).

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