Unleashing the cloud's full business value

A correctly implemented cloud can enable organizations to have more control on their run cost, enhance collaboration and employee productivity, accelerate innovation and improve time to market. It's no wonder organizations are investing plenty of resources – financial and human – into the cloud.

And yet, even though cloud migration and orchestration keep businesses occupied every day, many modern-day organizations can benefit from cloud solutions even more. According to a 2023 McKinsey report, just 10% of companies have fully captured the cloud’s potential value, 50% are starting to capture it, and the remaining 40% have seen no material value yet. Meanwhile, McKinsey estimates that an average company today could achieve 180% ROI in business benefit by adopting the cloud, "although few are getting close to these returns." This is why for as long as Schuberg Philis has used cloud computing, our criteria for its usage has stayed the same: we deploy cloud solutions when we know they will generate business value for our customers. And we remain confident in our ability to unleash the cloud's full potential within their digital transformation strategy.

Multiple clouds, multiple benefits

A single cloud has plenty to offer. Plus, most public cloud environments offer a rich set of features and services, with capabilities to keep technological complexity to a minimum. However, we're seeing more and more how organizations often profit from incorporating more than one cloud in their IT landscape. A 2023 report conducted by Forrester Consulting found that multi-cloud solutions were the most predominant strategy chosen by technology practitioners and decision-makers, noting that multi-cloud users enjoy “stronger security posture, better visibility, improved automated tooling, optimized costs, and the ability to attract, motivate, and retain new talent.” As a technology-agnostic and therefore also cloud-agnostic company, we can support multi-cloud and thus hybrid solutions, which mix private and public clouds.

For some of our customers, it is essential to have a private cloud for hosting mission-critical workloads while relying on the public cloud for running general-purpose workloads. Although cloud hyperscalers put forth immense computing power and rapidly roll out new services and features, a private cloud can keep crown-jewel workloads safe in a dedicated cluster in a dedicated rack with dedicated hardware that can be immediately accessed, restored, or moved. Simultaneously, it can offer capabilities allowing customers to drive their digital transformation, including opportunities to harness AI's potential for even their most sensitive data. In an age of rampant cyberattacks and geopolitical strife, having multiple clouds also helps guard against the risks of downtime and vendor lock-in. A private cloud, such as our own sbp.cloud, can be part of a hybrid solution for the kind of exit plan required by the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which will become enforceable for EU financial institutions and their ICT providers starting in 2025. This is why Schuberg Philis has come to offer cloud exit as a service (CEaaS) within our digital trust framework and, specifically, the guidance we give our customers toward regulatory compliance.

Also, in the wake of GDPR and the subsequent Schrems II ruling, a private cloud can host data that regulations dictate must be on sovereign soil. This is especially relevant for financial institutions, the GovTech sector, and other entities handling sensitive workloads, which tend to be high-volume yet must stay highly available and performant. Indeed, the growing urgency of a public-private differentiation became clear in a 2022 decision by the Netherlands' Minister for Digitalisation. While the ministry approved the Dutch government's use of the public cloud, it stipulated that it could not be used for data involving state secrets, the Ministry of Defense, or third-party suppliers from states with cyber programs at odds with Dutch interests.

A cloud enablement platform

To maintain the momentum of technology modernization – cloud-driven progress included – organizations must integrate their digital services. When well executed, each level of the stack accelerates business value. To serve as a base within that stack, at Schuberg Philis we developed a concept that we refer to as a cloud enablement platform. Intended to deploy infrastructure securely, rapidly, and automatedly, the platform can be customized to fulfill the varying needs of our customers. Its core purpose is to coordinate, guide, monitor, secure, and ultimately accelerate an organization’s digital journey while preventing incidents and the need for manual intervention.

Our cloud enablement platform consists of a cloud foundation with added enablement services. The cloud foundation is based on a set of core services and components to successfully operate a cloud environment. To address organization management, we include components that create policies and boundaries for the safe operation of workloads. In addition, it may be appropriate to include workload management components to provision and manage the environments where teams run their workloads. Built on top of a cloud foundation, the platform enablement services take over operational tasks or configure integrations, allowing the involved teams to instead meet actual business goals. This environment consists of consumable services in the form of standardized reusable technical assets, which we strive to incorporate as 80% off-the-shelf offerings and 20% bespoke or configurable services tailored to an entity’s specific needs.

We believe that building a cloud enablement platform should be guided by best-practice principles including a low barrier to entry that encourages ease of use, quick adoption, and good documentation. To ease speed of delivery and maintainability, we implement maximum automation and deploy everything as code. Above all, we guarantee that security and auditability are built into all our solutions, thereby making all environments secure and compliant by design. These features are mandatory given surging cyber threats and the cloud presenting an ever-broadening attack area for criminals to infiltrate. At the same time, our enablement platform, which we aim to get fully operational in under six weeks, should let customers ignite their investment in the public cloud. We encourage them to exploit the hyperscalers' many benefits for enterprises while gaining valuable time to spend on the tasks that differentiate their business.

A business-enabling asset

Many of the types of services that, years ago, we attended to on-premises are now in the cloud. Though the technology has changed, our principal preoccupation hasn't. Whether we help customers migrate their workloads to, or increase their nativity within, AWS, Azure, Google, sbp.cloud, or some combination thereof, our priority remains to enable better business. We seek to ensure that our customers can generate value in the cloud and that, whatever solution we implement, will unburden them of technical worries across the entire ecosystem in which it operates. Data solutions that handle billions of transactions, event-driven integration platforms, data intelligence platforms, and container platforms are just some examples of public cloud features that we have leveraged to run our customers' mission-critical workloads. And we have created these solutions for an array of businesses, including those handling transaction processing, cash solutions, parcel distribution, online retail, banks, and energy provision.

To unlock more opportunities in the ongoing cloud computing evolution, we must continue to have detailed conversations with our customers. We must learn about their value streams, risk appetite, and present-day and future business ambitions. We must acknowledge that the cloud in itself is not a money saver, but rather an asset that – when integrated according to what the business truly needs – can yield greater operational efficiency and thus cost savings. As the aforementioned McKinsey report states: “The lesson is that a cloud program can’t be put on autopilot; it has to be carefully tended and built up over time.” So the cloud isn't going anywhere and, as our two decades of mission-critical IT provision and long-term customer relationships attest to, neither are we.