Achieve cloud excellence and efficiency with the cloud maturity model

Business leaders around the world are asking their teams the same question: “Are we using the cloud effectively?” These challenges are often accompanied by the worry, “Are we spending too much money on cloud computing?” This is a valid concern, as a 2023 Statista study found that 82% of respondents surveyed ranked cloud spend management as a significant challenge.

Concerns about security, governance, and lack of resources and expertise also topped respondents’ concerns. The Cloud Maturity Model is a useful tool to address these challenges, build on your organization’s cloud strategy, and move forward with a plan and confidence in your cloud adoption.

The Cloud Maturity Model (or CMM) is a framework for assessing an organization’s readiness for cloud adoption at both the macro and individual service levels. This helps you assess how effectively your organization is using cloud services and resources, and how cloud services and security can be improved.

Why move to the cloud

Organizations are facing increasing pressure to move to the cloud in a world of real-time metrics, microservices, and APIs that benefit from both the flexibility and scalability of cloud computing. Examining cloud capabilities and maturity is a key component of this digital transformation, and cloud adoption offers tremendous benefits. McKinsey believes this presents a $3 trillion opportunity, and Deloitte research shows that nearly all responding cloud leaders (99%) see cloud as a cornerstone of their digital strategy.

A successful cloud strategy requires a comprehensive assessment of cloud maturity. This assessment is used to identify actions your organization needs to take (upgrading legacy technology, adjusting organizational workflows, etc.) to fully realize cloud benefits and pinpoint current shortcomings. CMM is a great tool for this assessment.

In reality, there are many CMMs out there, and organizations must decide which one best suits their business needs. A good starting point for many organizations is to engage in a three-stage assessment of cloud maturity using models such as the Cloud Adoption Maturity Model, Cloud Security Maturity Model, and Cloud Native Maturity Model.

Cloud Adoption Maturity Model

This maturity model helps you comprehensively measure your organization’s cloud maturity. It identifies the skills and internal knowledge your organization has, how well your organization’s culture is suited to embracing managed services, the experience of your DevOps team, and what initiatives you can take to begin migrating to the cloud. Progression through these levels is linear, meaning organizations must complete one step before moving on to the next.

• Legacy: Organizations starting their journey do not have any cloud-enabled applications or workloads, cloud services, or cloud infrastructure.
• Therefore: The following are tentative maturity levels: This means that organizations have begun their journey with cloud technologies such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the lowest level of resource control in the cloud. IaaS customers receive compute, network, and storage resources on demand over the Internet at pay-as-you-go pricing.
• Repeatable: Organizations at this stage are beginning to invest more in the cloud. This may include establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) and reviewing the scalability of initial cloud investments. Most importantly, organizations now have a repeatable process for moving apps, workflows, and data to the cloud.
• optimization: The cloud environment is now functioning efficiently and all new use cases follow the same foundations presented by the organization.
• Cloud Advanced: Organizations now have most, if not all, of their workflows in the cloud. Everything runs smoothly and efficiently, and all stakeholders recognize the cloud’s potential to achieve business goals.

Cloud Security Maturity Model

Optimizing security is paramount for any organization moving to the cloud. cloud can be The strong policies and posture used by cloud providers make them more secure than on-premises data centers. Considering that public cloud-based breaches can take months to remediate and have serious financial and reputational consequences, it is important to prioritize cloud security.

Cloud security represents a partnership between cloud service providers (CSPs) and their clients. While CSPs provide certification for the security inherent in their products, clients built in the cloud may experience misconfigurations or other issues when deployed on top of cloud infrastructure. Therefore, CSPs and clients must work together to create and maintain a secure environment.

The Cloud Security Alliance, of which IBM® is a member, has widely adopted the Cloud Security Maturity Model (CSMM). This model provides a good foundation for organizations looking to better embed security into their cloud environments.

Organizations may not want or need to adopt the entire model, but they can use the components that are appropriate for them. The five stages of the model revolve around the organization’s level of security automation.

• No automation: Security professionals manually identify and resolve incidents and issues through dashboards.

• Simple SecOps: This step includes some infrastructure as code (IaC) deployment and federation to some accounts.

• Script run manually: This step incorporates more federation and multi-factor authentication (MFA), but most automation is still done manually.

• Handrail: It includes a large library of automation that extends to multi-account guardrails, a high-level governance policy for your cloud environment.
• Automate anywhere: This is when everything is integrated into IaC and MFA and the use of federation becomes widespread.

Cloud Native Maturity Model

The first two maturity models are more indicative of an organization’s overall readiness. The Cloud Native Maturity Model (CNMM) is used to evaluate an organization’s ability to create apps (whether built internally or through open source tools) and cloud-native workloads. According to Deloitte, 87% of cloud leaders embrace cloud-native development.

As with any model, business leaders must first understand their business goals before embarking on this model. These goals will help you determine the level of maturity your organization needs. Business leaders should also look at their existing enterprise applications and determine which cloud migration strategy is best for them.

Most “lift and shift” apps can work in a cloud environment, but they may not be able to take advantage of all the benefits of the cloud. Mature cloud organizations often decide that it is best to build cloud-native applications for their most important tools and services.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has come up with its own model.

• Level 1 – Build: The organization is in pre-production with one proof-of-concept (POC) application and currently has limited organizational support. Business leaders understand the benefits of cloud native, and team members understand the fundamentals, even if they are new to the technology.

• Level 2 – Operations: Teams are investing in training and new skills, and SMEs are emerging within the organization. DevOps practices are being developed that bring together groups of cloud engineers and developers. This organizational change defines new teams, creates agile project groups, and establishes feedback and testing loops.

• Level 3 – Scale: Cloud-native strategies are now the preferred approach. Capabilities are improving, stakeholder buy-in is increasing, and cloud native has become a key focus. The organization began implementing a Shift-Left policy and actively training all employees on security initiatives. Although this level is often characterized by a high degree of centralization and clear delineation of responsibilities, it can create bottlenecks and reduce speed in the process.
• Level 4 – Improvements: At level 4, the cloud is the underlying infrastructure for all services. There is full commitment from leadership and the team’s focus is heavily on cloud cost optimization. Organizations explore areas for improvement and processes that can be made more efficient. Cloud expertise and responsibility are shifting from developers to all employees through self-service tools. Several groups have adopted Kubernetes to deploy and manage containerized applications. With a strong and established platform, the decentralization process can begin in earnest.
• Level 5 – Optimization: At this stage, the business has full trust in the technology team and employees across the company are brought into the cloud-native environment. Ownership of the service is established and distributed to self-sufficient teams. DevOps and DevSecOps are operational, highly skilled, and fully scalable. The team is comfortable with experimentation and adept at using data to make business decisions. Accurate data practices strengthen optimization efforts and enable organizations to adopt more FinOps practices. Operations are smooth, the goals outlined in the initial stages have been achieved, and the organization has a flexible platform to suit its needs.

What is best for my organization?

An organization’s level of cloud maturity determines the benefits and extent to which it can benefit from a move to the cloud. Not all organizations have reached or want to reach the highest level of maturity in each or all of the three models discussed here. However, according to Gartner, 70% of workloads will be in the cloud by 2024, so organizations will likely find it difficult to compete without some level of cloud maturity.

The benefits of the cloud become greater as your organization’s cloud infrastructure, security, and cloud-native application posture matures. By taking a hard look at current cloud capabilities and planning to improve maturity going forward, organizations can increase the efficiency of their cloud spending and maximize cloud benefits.

Advancing cloud maturity with IBM

Cloud migration with IBM® Instana® Observability helps set your organization up for success at each stage of the migration process (plan, migrate, execute), ensuring your applications and infrastructure run smoothly and efficiently. From setting performance baselines and right-sizing infrastructure to identifying bottlenecks and monitoring the end-user experience, Instana offers multiple solutions to help organizations build more mature cloud environments and processes.

However, migrating applications, infrastructure, and services to the cloud alone is not enough to drive successful digital transformation. Organizations need an effective cloud monitoring strategy that uses powerful tools to track key performance metrics, including response time, resource utilization, and error rates, to identify potential issues that can impact cloud resources and application performance.

Instana provides comprehensive, real-time visibility into the overall health of your cloud environment. This allows IT teams to proactively monitor and manage cloud resources across multiple platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

The IBM Turbonomic® platform proactively optimizes provisioning of compute, storage and network resources across the stack to avoid over-provisioning and increase ROI. Whether your organization is pursuing a cloud-first, hybrid cloud, or multicloud strategy, the Turbonomic platform’s AI-driven automation can help you contain costs while maintaining performance through automatic and continuous cloud optimization.

Explore IBM Instana Observability Explore IBM Turbonomic