Most of times the organizations adopting the cloud are not sure where they stand in terms of cloud adoption and how much far they need to go to achieve an optimized platform. The #Cloud Maturity Model (#CMM) provides one such yardstick to measure the progress for organizations.
What is Cloud Maturity model
Lot of times organizations are confused whether CMM has 4 stages or 6. Different blogs/technical discussions tend to break up the CMM differently based on their personal experiences. As an architect, I tend to go with 6 stages (based on Open Data Centre Alliance (ODCA) model) as it offers more granularity in evaluating the organization’s cloud success. The below diagram should give an idea about the cloud maturity model (CMM):
Where does your Organization stand?
Let’s discuss the stages shown above that will also provide an idea about where your organization stands in terms of cloud maturity:
CMM-0 – No cloud strategy
- IT architects/teams have no interest in exploring cloud.
- Organization is happy with where they are with the IT infrastructure/processes.
- For teams cloud is a myth and about to burst
CMM-1 - Experimental
- Organization is becoming familiar with Cloud Computing and terms like IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Containers, etc.
- Exploration of cloud technologies like storage, compute etc started in organizations and within teams.
- Proof of technology with tier 2/3 applications (non-critical) started on cloud.
- Multiple teams might be exploring the same services in their own way as no guidelines setup within organization.
CMM-2 – Opportunity based
- Multiple teams begin to get involved throughout the organization:, finance, security, marketing ,legal & compliance and others to setup the organization wide cloud policy
- The policies are implemented in “ad-hoc” manner by the teams
- Teams start migrating their non-critical applications to cloud (mostly lift & shift deployments) and start recoding their observations.
- Questions related to monitoring, security, costing, compliance etc of applications on cloud will start emerging and feed to company policies.
CMM-3 – Systematic
- Teams starts adopting more advanced cloud services like BigData (EMR, HDInsight), RDS etc and even start planning to migrate their data-centers to cloud.
- Teams start planning of moving their complex workloads to cloud (especially related to BigData and data-science) and start proof of technology around these areas.
- Automation of cloud deployments via CI/CD tools starts happening and devops starts becoming integral to the SDLC process.
- Applications are still deployed in their separate VMs, containerization yet to pick up.
CMM-4 – Cloud Ready & Managed
- Applications become more cloud aware and interacts with other applications via service interfaces like REST.
- More advanced cloud only services (like server-less AWS Lambdas, Azure functions, NoSQL services like (dynamoDB, cosmosDB etc) starts getting integrated into the systems/applications.
- Automation systems like Azure Runbooks or AWS OpsWorks are getting used for automating tasks.
- Organizations at this stage also start thinking of building their own private cloud for further optimizations in terms of costs and for reasons of compliance. At this stage, the on premise systems are treated at par with on-cloud systems and expected to offer same kind of stability, reliability and availability as on-cloud systems.
- Unified deployment models can do both public and private cloud deployments.
- Organizations start seeing benefit of containers. Greenfield projects are cloud aware by default and containerized.
CMM-5 – Cloud Mandated & Optimized
- Cloud is now mandatory for all applications/systems.
- Architecture patterns like stateless services/micro-services etc becomes de-facto standard in the organization
- If the organization maintains the private cloud, the identity federation offers seamless experience between multiple clouds.
- Teams talk in terms of services and service contracts.
- If the organization does not have private cloud, questions regarding the utility of organization’s data-centres starts emerging.
Hope this article helps you to identify where your organization stands in terms of cloud maturity. You might also think that your organization is meeting lot of criteria’s from various levels, so how to decide the maturity level. My recommendation is that unless your organization fulfils all the criteria for the lowest level, keep your organization at that lowest level, and try to fill in the gaps before moving to next level, this will your organization to have a solid foundation for the next level.
About me: I am an IT professional with 15+ years of experience. Currently working as cloud architect. Also investing my time on BigData and blockchain technologies. Tech learners is my attempt to introduce the technology in simple terms.