At Tridant, we are seeing client organisations prioritising the need to increase business continuity. Cloud spending has grown 33% in Q3 2020, as enterprises, across all verticals, tap into widely-documented benefits of moving their IT applications and workloads off-premise and leverage cloud-based platforms to boost business resilience, productivity and agility.
“I still think that people don’t really understand how incredibly large a logistics and operational challenge the cloud is,” said AWS CEO, Andy Jassy. “If you land too much capacity, you have a very wasteful and ineffective cost structure, and with too little, you run out of capacity and have outages.”
| As enterprises look to build out their cloud infrastructure strategy, CIOs and business leaders need to balance a cost-driven approach with a transformational vision to embed business agility. |
It all starts with well-designed architecture
Why is design important? A good technical design translates directly into the development speed and turn-around time, ultimately saving time and money. It can reduce maintenance costs, complexity, ensure scalability, and address all security needs.
| Where cloud platform choices truly come to life is with integration or essentially, the critical ability to run many vendor-specific software products on its preferred cloud platform. |
Business continuity in the cloud
As a large government-business enterprise in Australia began rebuilding its legacy core layer in a public cloud environment, migrating off traditional on-premise hardware and consolidating its data centre footprint, the organisation began moving workloads across to the cloud as well.
With its finance operations supported by the enterprise-grade planning, budgeting and forecasting platform, Tridant was appointed to deliver their IBM Planning Analytics upgrade on AWS.
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Tridant validated IBM Planning Analytics could run in AWS, with uninterrupted operations, continuous visibility, while maintaining service levels at all times.
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Kicking off intensive discovery sessions, Tridant platform architects collaborated early with internal infrastructure designers. The outcome was a detailed design blueprint that complied with organisational requirements for a cloud-based deployment.
Tridant identified mission-critical design considerations to address key objectives:
- Software Licensing – Reduced risk of non-compliance at all times, particularly in the event of a vendor audit
- Environment Topology – Alignment to enterprise standards and network considerations
- Capacity Planning – Limitless performance under peak user load
- Network Security – Secure communication between services that make up the solution
- Encryption –Secure access to data in transit and rest
- Identity Management – Secure and seamless application level access for end users
- Infrastructure as Code – Automation of the platform build that hosts the workload
- Configuration Management – Automation of the IBM software deployment
- Systems Management for Backup, Monitoring & Patching – Uninterrupted support of ongoing IT maintenance activities
- Endpoint Protection – Enable enterprise security for the ever-expanding IT perimeter
- Disaster Recovery – Return to business as usual (BAU) operations, as fast as possible, in the event of an outage or attack.
Meet user demand today, and be ready for tomorrow too
CIOs and business leaders need to focus on-boarding new services without disrupting staff productivity, to minimise risk and optimise stability, while keeping costs down.
Here are our 6 top considerations to running IBM Planning Analytic workloads on AWS:
- Alignment to Corporate IT Strategy is a major motivator for change as organisations embrace and transition to cloud-first strategies. With security concerns addressed by major platform providers such as AWS, the cost, scalability and business agility benefits are well-documented and compelling.
- Many organisations split infrastructure workloads between cloud platforms and on-premise data centres. These hybrid deployments are essentially a ‘best of both worlds’ scenario, empowering organisations to review each deployment for cloud readiness, on a case-by-case basis.
- Vendor-specific software products like IBM Planning Analytics contain a number of process-heavy workloads. Running these workloads on AWS lowers the infrastructure cost and the management of the loads through AWS Savings Plans.
- With the automation of workloads on AWS, limited IT resources are freed up to focus on more productive and high value-add activities for the business, rather than monitoring IBM Planning Analytics billings and server configurations, or handling time-consuming security and maintenance requests.
- AWS is inherently designed for improved availability, security and compliance. IBM Planning Analytic workloads running on top of the foundational AWS platform embeds operational resilience and efficiencies.
- Increases in business agility through the automation of workloads on AWS is growing. Any deployment of newer IBM applications has a faster turn-around delivery to users, and at less risk of error.
As organisations assess the optimal deployment and operating model for each workload, based on cost and performance, multi-cloud and hybrid IT will continue to gain momentum.
Assure uninterrupted availability, mitigate risk and optimise stability in your cloud migration. Talk with Tridant subject matter experts today.
A special thank you to Zac Anstee for his insights and contributions to this article.
Arun Ramanthan | Michelle Susay | Zac Anstee
