How Unisys and Microsoft team up to ease complex cloud adoption for governments and enterprises

The path to cloud computing adoption persistently appears complex and risky to both government and enterprise IT leaders, recent surveys show.

This next BriefingsDirect managed cloud methodologies discussion explores how tackling complexity and security requirements upfront helps ease the adoption of cloud architectures. By combining managed services, security solutions, and hybrid cloud standardization, both public and private sector organizations are now making the cloud journey a steppingstone to larger business transformation success.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

We'll now explore how cloud-native apps and services modernization benefit from prebuilt solutions with embedded best practices and automation. To learn how, we welcome Raj Raman, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Cloud at Unisys, and Jerry Rhoads, Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Raj, why are we still managing cloud adoption expectations around complexity and security? Why has it taken so long to make the path to cloud more smooth -- and even routine?

Raman: Well, Dana, I spend quite a bit of time with our customers. A common theme we see -- be it a government agency or a commercial customer – is that many of them are driven by organizational mandates and getting those organizational mandates in place often proves challenging, more so than what one thinks.

Cloud adoption challenges 

The other part is that while Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure may be very easy to get on to, the question then becomes how do you scale up? They have to either figure out how to develop in-house capabilities or they look to a partner like Unisys to help them out.

Raman

Cloud security adoption continues to be a challenge because enterprises still try and wish to apply traditional security practices to the cloud. Having a security and risk posture on AWS or Azure means having a good understanding of the shared security model across user level, application and infrastructure layers of the cloud.

And last, but not least, a very clear mandate such as digital transformation or a specific initiative, where there is a core sponsor around it, oftentimes does ease the whole focus on some of these.

These are some of the reasons we see for cloud complexity. The applications transformation can also be quite arduous for many of our clients.

Gardner: Jerry, what are you seeing for helping organizations get cloud-ready? What best practices make for a smoother on-ramp?

Rhoads: One of the best practices beforehand is to determine what your endgame is going to look like. What is your overall cloud strategy going to look like?

Rhoads

Instead of just lifting and shifting a workload, what is the life cycle of that workload going to look like? It means a lot of in-depth planning -- whether it's a government agency or private enterprise. Once we get into the mandates, it's about, “Okay, I need this application that’s running in my on-premises data center to run in the cloud. How do I make it happen? Do I lift it and shift it or do I re-architect it? If so, how do I re-architect for the cloud?”

That’s a big common theme I’m seeing: “How do I re-architect my application to take better advantage of the cloud?”

Gardner: One of the things I have seen is that a lot of organizations do well with their proof of concepts (POCs). They might have multiple POCs in different parts of the organization. But then, getting to standardized comprehensive cloud adoption is a different beast.

Raj, how do you make that leap from spotty cloud adoption, if you will, to more holistic?

One size doesn’t fit all

Raman: We advise customers to try and [avoid] taking it on as a one-size-fits-all. For example, we have one client who is trying – all at once – to lift and shift thousands of applications.

Now, they did a very detailed POC and they got yield from that POC. But when it came to the actual migration and transformation, they were convinced and felt confident that they could take it on and try it en masse, with thousands of applications.

The thing is, in trying to do that, not all applications are one size. One needs a phased approach for doing application discovery and application assessment. Then, based on that, you can determine which applications are well worth the effort [to move to a cloud].

So we recommend to customers that they think of migrations as a phased approach. Be very clear in terms of what you want to accomplish. Start small, gain the confidence, and then have a milestone-based approach of accomplishing it all.

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Gardner: These mandates are nonetheless coming down from above. For the US federal government, for example, cloud has become increasingly important. We are expecting somewhere in the vicinity of $3.3 billion to be spent for federal cloud in 2021. Upward of 60 percent of federal IT executives are looking to modernization. They have both the cloud and security issues to face. Private sector companies are also seeing mandates to rapidly become cloud-native and cloud-first.

Jerry, when you have that pressure on an IT organization -- but you have to manage the complexity of many different kinds of apps and platforms -- what do you look for from an alliance partner like Unisys to help make those mandates come to fruition?

Rhoads: In working with partners such as Unisys, they know the customer. They are there on the ground with the customer. They know the applications. They hear the customers. They understand the mandates. We also understand the mandates and we have the cloud technology within Azure. Unisys, however, understands how to take our technology and integrate it in with their end customer’s mission.

Gardner: And security is not something you can just bolt on, or think of, after the fact in such migrations. Raj, are we seeing organizations trying to both tackle cloud adoption and improve their security? How do Unisys and Microsoft come together to accomplish those both as a tag team rather than a sequence, or even worse, a failure?

Secure your security strategy

Raman: We recently conducted a survey of our stakeholders, including some of our customers. And to no surprise security -- be it as part of the migrations or in scaling up their current cloud initiatives – is by far a top area of focus and concern.

We are already partnering with Microsoft and others with our flagship security offering, Unisys Stealth. We are not just in collaboration but leapfrogging in terms of innovation. The Azure cloud team has released a specific API to make products like Stealth available. This now gives customers more choice and it allows Unisys to help meet customers in terms of where they are.

Also, earlier this year we worked very closely with the Microsoft cloud team to release Unisys CloudForte for Azure. These are foundational elements that help both governments as well as commercial customers leverage Azure as a platform for doing their digital transformation.

The Microsoft team has also stepped up and worked very closely with the Unisys team developers and architects to make these services native on Azure.

The Microsoft team has also stepped up and worked very closely with the Unisys team developers and architects to make these services native on Azure, as well as help customers understand how they can better consume Azure services.

Those are very specific examples in which we see the Unisys collaboration with Microsoft scaling really well.

Gardner: Jerry, it is, of course, about more than just the technology. These are, after all, business services. So whether a public or private organization is making the change to an operations model -- paying as you consume and budgeting differently -- financially you need to measure and manage cloud services differently.

How is that working out? Why is this a team sport when it comes to adopting cloud services as well as changing the culture of how cloud-based business services are consumed?

Keep pay-as-you-go under control 

Rhoads: One of the biggest challenges I hear from our customers is around going from a CAPEX model to an OPEX model. They don’t really understand how it works.

CAPEX is a longtime standard -- here is the price and here is how long it is good for until you have to then re-up and buy new piece of hardware or re-up the license, or whatnot. Using cloud, it’s pay-as-you-go.

If I launch 400 servers for an hour, I’m paying for 400 virtual machines running for one hour. So if we don’t have a governance strategy in place to stop something like that, we can wind up going through one year's worth of budget in 30 days -- if it's not governed, if it's not watched.

And that's why, for instance, working with Unisys CloudForte there are built-in controls to where you can go through and ping the Azure cloud backend -- such as Azure Cost Management or our Cloudyn product -- where you can see how much your current charges are, as well as forecast what those charges are going to look like. Then you can get ahead of the eight ball, if you will, to make sure that you are actually burning through your budget correctly -- versus getting a surprise at the end of the month.

Gardner: Raj, how should organizations better manage that cultural shift around cloud consumption governance?

Raman: Adding to Jerry’s point, we see three dimensions to help customers. One is what Unisys calls setting up a clear cloud architecture, the foundations. We actually have an offering geared around this. And, again, we are collaborating with Microsoft on how to codify those best practices.

In going to the cloud, we see five pillars that customers have to contend with: cost, security, performance, availability, and operations. Each of these can be quite complex and very deep.

Rather than have customers figure these out themselves, we have combined product and framework. We have codified it, saying, “Here are the top 10 best practices you need to be aware of in terms of cost, security, performance, availability, and operations.”

It makes it very easy for the Unisys consultants, architects, and customers to understand at any given point -- be it pre-migration or post-migration -- that they have clear visibility on where they stand for their review on cost in the cloud.

We are also thinking about security and compliance upfront -- not as an afterthought. Oftentimes customers go deep into the journey and they realize they may not have the controls and the security postures, and the next thing you know they start to lose confidence.

So rather than wait for that, the thinking is we arm them early. We give them the governance and the policies on all things security and compliance. And Azure has very good capabilities toward this.

The third bit, and Jerry touched on this, is overall financial governance. The ability to think about -- not just cost as a matter of spinning a few Azure resources up and down – but in a holistic way, in a governance model. That way you can break it up in terms of analyzed or utilized resources. You can do chargebacks and governance and gain the ability to optimize cost on an ongoing basis.

These are distinctive foundational elements that we are trying to arm customers with and make them a lot more comfortable and gain the trust as well as the process with cloud adoption.

Gardner: The good news about cloud offerings like Azure and hybrid cloud offerings like Azure Stack is you gain a standardized approach. Not necessarily one-size-fits-all, but an important methodological and technical consistency. Yet organizations are often coming from a unique legacy, with years and years of everything from mainframes to n-tier architectures, and applications that come and go.

How do Unisys and Microsoft work together to make the best of standardization for cloud, but also recognize specific needs that each organization has?

Different clouds, same experience

Rhoads: We have Azure Stack for on-premise Azure deployments. We also have Azure Commercial Cloud as well as Azure Government Cloud and Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud. The good news is that they use the same portal, same APIs, same tooling, and same products and services across all three clouds.

Now, as services roll out, they roll out in our Commercial Cloud first, and then we will roll them out into Azure Government as well as into Azure Stack. But, again, the good news is these products are available, and you don’t have to do any special configuration or anything in the backend to make it work. It’s the same experience regardless of which product the customer wants to use.

Unisys CloudForte works with Azure Stack, with Commercial, and Azure for Government. For the end customers it's the same cloud services that they expect to use. The difference is just where those cloud services live.

What’s more, Unisys CloudForte works with Azure Stack, with Commercial, and Azure for Government. For the end customer it's the same cloud services that they expect to use. The difference really is just where those cloud services live, whether it's with Azure Stack on-premises, on a cruise ship or in a mine, or if you are going with Azure Commercial Cloud, or if you need a regulated workload such as a FedRAMP high workload or an IC4, IC5 workload, then you would go into Azure Government. But there are no different skills required to use any of those clouds.

Same skill set. You don’t have to do any training, it’s the same products and services. And if the products and services aren't in that region, you can work with Unisys or myself to engage the product teams to put those products in Azure Stack or in Azure for Government.

Gardner: How does Unisys CloudForte managed services complement these multiple Azure cloud environments and deployment models?

Rhoads: CloudForte really further standardizes it. There are different levels of CloudForte, for instance, and the underlying cloud really doesn’t matter, it’s going to be the same experience to roll that out. But more importantly, CloudForte is really an on-ramp. A lot of times I am working with customers and they are like, “Well, gee, how do I get started?”

Whether it’s setting up that subscription in-tenant, getting them on-board with that, as well as how to roll out that POC, how do they do that, and that’s where we leverage Unisys and CloudForte as the on-ramp to roll out that first POC. And that’s whether that POC is a bare-bones Azure virtual network or if they are looking to roll out a complete soup-to-nuts application with application services wrapped around it. CloudForte and Unisys can provide that functionality.

Do it your way, with support 

Raman: Unisys CloudForte has been designed as an offering on top of Azure. There are two key themes. One, meet customers where they are. It's not about what Unisys is trying to do or what Azure is trying to do. It's about, first and foremost, being customer obsessed. We want to help customers do things on their terms and do it the right way.

So CloudForte has been designed to meet those twin objectives. The way we go about doing it is -- imagine, if you will, a flywheel. The flywheel has four parts. One, the whole consumption part, which is the ability to consume Azure workloads at any given point.

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Next is the ability to run commands, or the operations piece. Then you follow that up with the ability to accelerate transformations, so data migrations or app modernization.

Last, but not least, is to transform the business itself, be it on a new technology, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), blockchain, or anything that can wrap on top of Azure cloud services.

The beauty of the model is a customer does not have to buy all of these en masse; they could be fitting into any of this. Some customers come and say, “Hey, we just want to consume the cloud workloads, we really don’t want to do the whole transformation piece.” Or some customers say, “Thank you very much, we already have the basic consumption model outlined. But can you help us accelerate and transform?”

So the ability to provide flexibility on top of Azure helps us to meet customers where they are. That’s the way CloudForte has been envisioned, and a key part of why we are so passionate and bullish in working with Microsoft to help customers meet their goals.

Gardner: We have talked about technology, we have talked about process, but of course people and human capital and resources of talent and skills are super important as well. So Raj, what does the alliance between Unisys and Microsoft do to help usher people from being in traditional IT to be more cloud-native practitioners? What are we doing about the people element here?

Expert assistance available

Raman: In order to be successful, one of the big focus areas with Unisys is to arm and equip our own people, be it at the consulting level, a sales-facing level, either doing cloud architectures or even doing cloud delivery, across the stripe, rank and file. There is an absolute mandate to increase the number of certifications, especially the Azure certifications.

In fact, I can also share that Unisys, as we speak, every month we have a doubling of people who are across the rank of Azure 300 and the 900. These are the two popular certifications, the whole Azure stack of it. We have now north of 300 trained people, and maybe my number is at the lower end. We expect the number to double.

So we have absolute commitment, because customers look to us to not only come in and solve the problems, but to do it with the level of expertise that we claim. So that’s why our commitment to getting our people trained and certified on Azure is a very important piece of it.

Gardner: One of the things I love to do is to not just tell, but to show. Do we have examples of where the Unisys and Microsoft alliance -- your approach and methodologies to cloud adoption, tackling the complexity, addressing the security, and looking at both the unique aspect of each enterprise and their skills or people issues -- comes all together? Do you have some examples?

Raman: The California State University is a longstanding customer of ours, a good example where they have transformed their own university infrastructure using Unisys CloudForte with a specific focus on all things hybrid cloud. We are pleased to see that not only is the customer happy but they are quite eager to get back to us in terms of making sure that their mandates are met on a consistent basis.

Our federal agencies are usually reluctant to be in the spotlight. That said, what I can share are representative examples. We have some very large defense establishments working with us. We have some state agencies close to the Washington, DC area, agencies responsible for the roll-out of cloud consumption across the mandates.

We are well on our way in not only working with the Microsoft Azure cloud teams, but also with state agencies. Each of these agencies is citywide or region-wide, and within that they have a health agency or an agency focused on education or social services.

In our experience, we are seeing an absolute interest in adopting the public clouds for them to achieve their citizens’ mandates. So those are some very specific examples.

Gardner: Jerry, when we look to both public and private sector organizations, how do you know when you are doing cloud adoption right? Are there certain things you should look to, that you should measure? Obviously you would want to see that your budgets are moving from traditional IT spending to cloud consumption. But what are the metrics that you look to?

The measure of success 

Rhoads: One of the metrics that I look at is cost. You may do a lift and shift and maybe you are a little bullish when you start building out your environments. When you are doing cloud adoption right, you should see your costs start to go down.

So your consumption will go up, but your costs will go down, and that’s because you are taking advantage of either platform as a service (PaaS) in the cloud, and being able to auto-scale out, or looking to move to say Kubernetes and start using things like Docker containers and shutting down those big virtual machines (VMs), and clusters of VMs, and then running your Kubernetes services on top of them.

When you see those costs go down and your services going up, that’s usually a good indicator that you are doing it right.

Gardner: Just as a quick aside, Jerry, we have also seen that Microsoft Azure is becoming very container- and Kubernetes-oriented, is that true?

Rhoads: Yes, it is. We actually have Brendan Burns, as a matter of fact, who was one of the co-creators of Kubernetes during his time at Google.

Gardner: Raj, how do you know when you are getting this right? What do you look to as chief metrics from Unisys's perspective when somebody has gone beyond proof of concept and they are really into a maturity model around cloud adoption?

Raman: One of the things we take very seriously is our mandate to customers to do cloud on your terms and do it right. And what we mean by that is something very specific, so I will break it in two.

One is from a customer-led metric perspective. We actually rank ourselves very seriously in terms of Net Promoter Score. We have one of the highest in the industry relative to the rest of our competitions. And that's something that's hard-earned, but we keep striving to raise the bar on how our customers talk to each other and how they feel about us.

The other part is the ability to retain customers, so retention. So those are two very specific customer-focused benchmarks.

Now, building upon some of the examples that Jerry was talking about, from a cloud metric perspective, besides cost and besides cost optimization, we also look at some very specific metrics, such as how many net-net workloads are there under management. What are some of the net new services that are being launched? We especially are quite curious to see if there is a focus in terms of Kubernetes or AI and ML adoption, are there any trends toward that?

We rank ourselves very seriously in terms of Net Promoter Score. We have one of the highest in the industry, but we keep striving to raise the bar on how our customers talk to each other and feel about us.

One of the very interesting ones that I will share, Dana, is that some of our customers are starting to come and ask us, “Can you help set up an Azure Cloud center of excellence within our organization?” So that oftentimes is a good indicator that the customer is looking to transform the business beyond the initial workload movement.

And last, but not the least, is training, and absolute commitment to getting their own organization to become more cloud-native.

Gardner: I will toss another one in, and I know it's hard to get organizations to talk about it, but fewer security breaches, fewer days or instances of downtime because of a ransomware attack. So it's hard to get people to talk about it if you can't always prove when you don’t get attacked, but certainly a better security posture as compared to two years, three years ago would be a high indicator on my map as to whether cloud is being successful for you.

All right, we are almost out of time, so let's look to the future. What comes next when we get to a maturity model, when organizations are comprehensive, standardized around cloud, have skills and culture oriented to the cloud regardless of their past history? We are also of course seeing more use of the data behind the cloud, in operations and using ML and AI to gain AIOps benefits.

Where can we look to even larger improvements when we employ and use all that data that’s now being generated within those cloud services?

Continuous cloud propels the future 

Raman: One of the things that’s very evident to us is, as customers start to come to us and use the cloud at significant scale, is it is very hard for any one organization. Even for Unisys, we see this, which is how do you get scaled up and keep up with the rate of change that the cloud platform vendors such as Azure are bringing to the table; all good innovations, but how do you keep on top of that?

So that’s where a focus on what we are calling as “AI-led operations” is becoming very important for us. It’s about the ability to go and look at the operational data and have these customers go from a reactive, from a hindsight-led model, to a more proactive and a foresight-driven model, which can then guide, not only their cloud operations, but also help them think about where they can now leverage this data and use that Azure infrastructure to then launch more innovation or new business mandates. That’s where the AIOps piece, the AI-led operations piece, of it kicks in.

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There is a reason why cloud is called continuous. You gain the ability to have continuous visibility via compliance or security, to have constant optimization, both in terms of best practices, reviewing the cloud workloads on a constant basis and making sure that their architectures are being assessed for the right way of doing Azure best practices.

And then last, but not the least, one other trend I would surface up, Dana, as a part of this, which is we are starting to see an increase in the level of conversational bots. Many customers are interested in getting to a self-service mode. That’s where we see conversational bots built on Azure or Cortana will become more mainstream.

Gardner: Jerry, how do organizations recognize that the more cloud adoption they have, the more standardization, the more benefits they will get in terms of AIOps and a virtuous adaption pattern kicks in?

Rhoads: To expand on what Raj talked about with AIOps, we actually have built in a lot of AI into our products and services. One of them is with Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) on Azure. Another one is with anti-phishing mechanisms that are deployed in Office 365.

So as more folks move into the cloud, we are seeing a lot of adoption around these products and services, as well as we are also able to bring in a lot of feedback and do a lot of learning off of some of the behaviors that we are seeing to make the products even better.

DevOps integrated in the cloud 

So one of things that I do, in working with my customers is DevOps, how do we employ DevOps in the cloud? So a lot of folks are doing DevOps on-premises and they are doing it from an application point of view. I am rolling out my application on an infrastructure that is either virtualized or physical, sitting in my data center, how do I do that in the cloud, why do I do that in the cloud?

Well, in the cloud everything is software, including infrastructure. Yes, it sits on a server at the end of the day; however, it is software-defined, being it is software-defined, it has an API, I can write code. So therefore if I want to blow out or roll out a suite of VMs or I want to roll out Kubernetes clusters and put my application on top of it, I can create definable, repeatable code, if you will, that I can check into a repository someplace, press the button, and roll out that infrastructure and put my application on top of it.

So now deploying applications, especially with DevOps in the cloud, it's not about I have an operations team and then I have my DevOps team that rolls out the application on top of existing infrastructure. Instead I actually bundle it altogether. I have tighter integration, which means I now have repeatable deployments and I can do my deployments, instead of doing them every quarter or annually, I can do deployments -- I can do 20, 30, 1,000 a day if I like, if I do it right.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Unisys and Microsoft.

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