Introduction: CIO Sheila Jordan
As promised, here is the fourth blog in our IT Showcase series that chronicles our IT transformation over the past three years. Today’s topic is our infrastructure journey to hybrid cloud, authored by Chandra Ranganathan, our vice president with global responsibility for network and infrastructure services across the company. I hope you find it to be a worthwhile read—we welcome your feedback!
Journey to a Hybrid Cloud
Nearly every CIO I know has debated whether to move all or part of their IT workloads to the public cloud. There are many advantages: Public clouds enable companies to shift capital to operational expenses, and offer greater elasticity and economies of scale. But it isn’t always a clear cut decision. A company’s specific business or industry can often dictate the strategy and approach.
At Symantec IT, our journey to the cloud started in 2014. While a move to the public cloud was always part of our roadmap, we ultimately chose a hybrid cloud strategy that would support our business, protect our data, and increase efficiencies.
The results have been transformative for our IT infrastructure. We’re not only more agile, more secure and able to provide a much better customer experience, but we’ve also been able to reduce our operating expenses by more than 55%.
Our hybrid cloud strategy involved a four-pronged approach. Here’s how we carried it out:
- Private Cloud: First we built a software-defined data center (called Next Generation Secure Data Center), setting up a virtualized, automated, and ‘converged’ infrastructure with software-defined compute, storage and network capabilities. Orchestration was enabled through a single pane-of-glass cloud management platform providing self-service IaaS capabilities. We also implemented best-of-breed core and enabling tools to provide real-time lifecycle management of infrastructure, including a shared DevOps stack with federated and role-based access.
- Repatriation: In parallel, we moved the entire infrastructure ecosystem in-house from an outsourced managed services model. In its place, we set up a hybrid support mechanism that included third-party vendor support for operations in a managed-capacity model.
- Legacy workload migration: We migrated legacy workloads to the private cloud, leveraging the cloud’s multi-tenancy capabilities for a major spin-off. We also expedited the migration of over 150+ legacy Symantec apps within one year, in the process rationalizing 55% of our applications and decommissioning 38% of our servers.
- Extension to public cloud: We kicked off our move to the public cloud by completing a public versus private cloud economics and ROI analysis, a workload segmentation exercise and vendor capabilities evaluation assessment. Based on the outcome, we selected Microsoft Azure as our public cloud partner for most of our Consumer product and Enterprise IT workloads. In the last six months, we have designed and deployed core services across four Azure regions, and migrated 55 critical external-facing applications to the platform. We also set up real-time dashboards to track and report financial, operational and security metrics to govern adoption and utilization.
Experience is the best teacher so let me share some of what we learned along the way:
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Not all applications are equal. Assess your applications based on technical, security, compliance, financial and legal criteria to create a “heat map” framework reflecting best fit and ease of migration to public cloud.
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One size may not fit all. Try to understand the capabilities and limitations of public cloud vendors. For instance, we found that one vendor was stronger when it came to enterprise IT, e-business and consumer product workloads. Another was a better fit when it came to enterprise security cloud products. So diversify. Also, a multi-public cloud provider strategy prevents vendor lock-in and fosters more competitive pricing.
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“Lift and shift” alone will not help realize benefits. If private cloud efficiencies have already been realized, you need to re-engineer and ‘cloudify’ applications to further optimize public cloud cost.
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Validate your cloud provider’s claims. Don’t leave yourself vulnerable to surprises and have a backup plan to address capability gaps in your public cloud provider’s offerings.
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Partner and collaborate with key business stakeholders for requirements, design and delivery. Spend time on initial planning and analysis (economics comparison, capabilities assessment, workload segmentation, application prioritization, architecture, etc.).
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Define roles and responsibilities across IT and business units, and adopt federated role-based access where needed. Leverage a third party migration partner (as needed), and where possible, technical resources from the provider as extended members of your team.
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Plan for the evolution of your team, moving them from a siloed mindset to become cloud specialists with the skills and mindset to deliver ‘infrastructure as code.’ Establish a services-based model, DevOps culture and flexible architecture.
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Know that cloud will disrupt your teams—so be sure to communicate, communicate, communicate.
Finally, companies need a governance mechanism to ensure all parts of their business are following the correct cloud process. At Symantec, we launched and now operate a cross-functional Cloud Council that’s responsible for cloud adoption and optimization. The council is co-chaired by IT, Security and Engineering leadership supported by extended stakeholders and provides technical, security and financial governance.
These efforts have paid off with benefits to both the top and bottom lines:
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Reduced compute and storage provision time from months to hours—and in some cases, minutes—while the implementation of automation and self-serve capabilities have resulted in significantly improved customer experience and speed-to-innovate.
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Reduced critical infrastructure incidents by 90% while improving the availability and utilization of the resources at all layers of the IaaS stack.
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Automated and enhanced infrastructure lifecycle management including discovery, mapping, provisioning, monitoring and analytics, incident and problem management, asset and configuration management and reporting.
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Moving to the new system has led to significant consolidation and more efficient use of resources. We have been able to reduce the number of labs by 46% across 19 Symantec sites, and consolidate regional infrastructure from over 45 sites down to 10. We’ve also increased storage utilization to over 80%, optimized our backup ecosystem by 40%and consolidated primary data center space by nearly 60%.
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Reduced overall operating expenses by 55% by combining our private cloud, legacy migrations and repatriation efforts.
This is part of an ongoing transformation process and we’ll doubtless learn more in coming months and years. Cloud is obviously a topic of great interest to me and I am eager to hear more about your cloud journey!