3 best practices for

accelerating cloud
transformation

How to plan app modernization, scale processes, and operate

services with resilience in the cloud
 Introduction
Cloud has become the vehicle for most organizations to more quickly
deliver new products and services to customers digitally. But many
companies struggle to understand how to scale their cloud initiatives
with the same security, cost, resilience, and risk management that they

50%
did on-premises.

That’s because migrating from on premises to cloud is a huge

undertaking literally years in the making, and the path isn’t always as
straightforward as a 1-to-1 re-mapping and re-creation of your on-site
environment—no matter if you’re moving to SaaS, refactoring, rehosting
of organizations will use industry apps, or architecting for cloud-native environments.
cloud platforms to accelerate
their digital business initiatives “It’s a complicated process going way beyond just the technology
by 2027—up from less than 5% involved in moving to cloud,” says Josh Goldstein, Vice President
of Product Strategy at ServiceNow. “It’s an entire remake of how a
in 2022 1 company manages its technology portfolio.”

Whether you’ve yet to explore or choose a service provider, or if you’re

already in a good operational state with a vendor and have some
approaches in mind—inevitably you will find yourself wondering, “What
Gartner, “The Future of Cloud 2027,” presented by David
does ‘good’ look like, anyway? How do successful companies operate
1

Smith at the Gartner Infrastructure, Optimization, and Cloud

Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, December 6–9, 2022 in the cloud?” Even if you have current thoughts about how to approach
your transformation, how are those going to change as you go along?

In this guide we’ll share best practices for building business agility that
accelerates your journey to the cloud.

3 best practices for accelerating cloud transformation | 2

 Cloud adoption is accelerating...
Cloud—both infrastructure and platform as a service—provides the
flexibility, availability, and up-and-down scalability that companies
need to adapt and thrive.

With the “cloud-first ASAP” attitude now prevalent in enterprises,

adoption has accelerated in the past two years. Many companies
are reducing investments in on-premises technology while budgeting
toward scaling in the cloud; this shift in cloud investments is outpacing
traditional and on-prem technologies. 2 Gartner predicts that cloud-
native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new

95%
digital initiatives by 2025—up from less than 40% in 2021.3

This trend has companies moving toward a zero-physical-footprint

model by shutting down data centers. They know that they need to
scale on demand to keep pace with business growth, and the best
way to do that is to migrate business-critical applications and services
to an as-a-service model while maintaining high availability, data of new digital workloads will be deployed
integrity, and seamless user experiences—regardless of the services or on cloud-native platforms by 2025 4
the location of the user.

“Customers want to focus on their core business, whether that’s food

service, retail, manufacturing, financial services, or something else,”
says Goldstein. ”They’re moving to cloud to reduce the need to own

68%
and operate their own data centers and to gain agility.”

For example, ServiceNow chose Azure as our public cloud provider to

migrate business-critical applications, then we moved collaboration,
corporate telephony, and the contact center to platform as a service.

of organizations say cloud is an important

part of their digital business initiatives 5
2
Gartner press release, “Gartner Says More Than Half of Enterprise IT Spending in Key Market Segments Will Shift to
the Cloud by 2025,” February 9, 2022
3
Gartner press release, “Gartner Says Cloud Will Be the Centerpiece of New Digital Experiences,” November 10, 2021
4
Ibid.
5
Gartner, “Beyond Cloud Cost Management Is Cloud Economics,” presented by Ken Rothenberger at the Gartner
Infrastructure, Optimization, and Cloud Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, December 6–9, 2022

3 best practices for accelerating cloud transformation | 3

 Survey respondents say cloud computing
is either indispensable or heavily
…But people and processes delay impactful for:

the adoption timeline More than

50%
The goal is to accelerate the digital transformation that cloud enables.
Organizations want to develop the ability to roll out new products
and services faster and deliver great experiences. But it’s not just
a technology problem—some of the biggest obstacles for cloud
transformation are reskilling people and redesigning processes to catch
of enterprises in 2022
up to the rapid innovation of cloud technologies. Legacy processes,
lack of business alignment and software planning, imperfect cost
visibility, unclear security best practices, and nonexistent governance
models slow down cloud transformation. And more than

90%
In addition, new development for customer-facing applications really
should be done in an agile, DevOps-driven model on cloud-native
platforms, where challenges frequently arise in planning, scaling,
and operations.
of enterprises in 2027

Yet

40%
of enterprises’ multicloud expectations
6
Gartner, “The Future of Cloud 2027,” presented by David Smith at the Gartner Infrastructure, Optimization,
and Cloud Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, December 6–9, 2022 will be unachievable 6

3 best practices for accelerating cloud transformation | 4

 Cloud goals vs. cloud reality
GOALS:
• Adopting faster (for example, 80% in public cloud within three years)
• Modernizing architecture
• Reducing legacy spend and cloud operating costs
• Unleashing agility and innovation

ROADBLOCKS:
• Finding and scaling talent with cloud expertise
• Architecting for success
• Reimagining legacy processes, especially in regulated industries
• Maintaining governance and security

How do we build the processes and the architectures

to do it properly? How do we think about our legacy
processes and modernize those to move to the cloud?
And when we’re doing this at scale, how do we maintain
governance, security, and operational excellence?
- Josh Goldstein, Vice President of Product Strategy, ServiceNow

3 best practices for accelerating cloud transformation | 5

 ROI takes center stage
Adding to the people and process challenge is that while most
enterprises already have plans for cloud migration, technology
organizations are feeling more pressure to make the shift faster. They
have to prove spending in tough economic times—when they’re
having to commit to cloud service providers in a major way with
hundreds of millions of dollars. Everyone wants to know, “What’s our
strategy for getting ROI on this investment?”

For example, many CTOs want to modernize apps but also prove
ROI of the cloud, but sometimes the challenge is in realizing that true
ROI. Because organizational processes typically lack automation and
cross-enterprise visibility, many enterprises have redundant, legacy, or

22%
obsolete apps that are running both on premises and in the cloud. As
a result, legacy apps aren’t getting shut down and are not yet fully
re-architected for cloud-native, which means enterprises aren’t yet
seeing the full cloud ROI.

of infrastructure and operations (I&O)

leaders feel prepared for unexpected
A cloud economics practice is one cloud costs 8
where managing the entire value of
cloud is taken into account, not just

25%
the associated costs. 7
– Ken Rothenberger, Senior Director Advisor, Gartner

or more overspending in the cloud

through 2026 for organizations that
do not build cost resilience into their
cloud infrastructure9
7
 artner, “Beyond Cloud Cost Management Is Cloud Economics,” presented by Ken Rothenberger at the
G
Gartner Infrastructure, Optimization, and Cloud Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, December 6–9, 2022
8
Gartner, “Prevent Cloud Cost Spirals by Building Cost Resilience Into Your Cloud,” presented by David Wright at the
Gartner Infrastructure, Optimization, and Cloud Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, December 6–9, 2022
9
Ibid.

3 best practices for accelerating cloud transformation | 6

 GARTNER’S LIST OF THE TOP 10
Cloud journeys don’t all look CLOUD-STRATEGY MISTAKES11
the same 1. Assuming it’s an IT (-only) strategy,
There may be many microjourneys within a company’s cloud not involving business
transformation, from infrastructure replacement to digital
transformation, but Gartner points out that they should all begin with 2. Not having an exit strategy
a business-driven strategy coupled with a pragmatic transformation
plan—a clear picture of where you are now and where you’re heading.10 3. Combining a cloud strategy with cloud
A good cloud transformation plan must involve these three adoption/migration/implementation
best practices:
4. “It’s not too late; we’re already
• Modernizing applications
executing,” redoing everything
• Scaling processes
5. Equating a cloud strategy with “we’re
• Operating with resilience
moving everything to cloud”

6. Our cloud strategy is our data center

Customers have figured out cloud strategy/it’s “all in” or nothing

in pockets—now they need to scale 7. Our strategy is by executive mandate

quickly across the enterprise. One 8. We’re a <fill in vendor> shop so that’s our

customer told us they need to go cloud strategy/we need a single-vendor

cloud strategy
from 20/80 to 80/20 cloud/on-prem 9. Outsourcing our cloud strategy
ratio within the next three years.
10. We are cloud first, and this is
– Gab Menachem, Senior Director of Product Management, ServiceNow
our strategy

10 
Gartner, “The Cloud Journey: From Strategy to Transformation,” presented by David Smith at the Gartner
Infrastructure, Optimization, and Cloud Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, December 6–9, 2022
11
Ibid.

3 best practices for accelerating cloud transformation | 7


Plan application modernization for the cloud by:
• Rationalizing and modernizing applications
• Tracking, reducing, and managing software,
cloud, and hardware costs
3 best practices for accelerating cloud transformation
Best practice 1:
Plan application modernization
CTOs want to modernize apps but also prove the ROI of
the cloud. They also fear not having the right risk metrics
when transforming apps to the cloud.
Avoid lift and shift
A typical large company might have thousands of
applications running in its technology estate. Its trying
to figure out how it can look across that portfolio of
applications, figure out which ones to target for cloud and
why, which ones to do first, and then stage out this entire
journey over the next several years—all while trying
to minimize cloud spend.
While lift and shift of existing applications as-is may be
the easiest and fastest way to do things, companies often
find when that they do that, they end up spending a lot
of money in cloud—as a result, they later start figuring out
how to rewrite applications or refactor them to make them
more efficient in the cloud.
Prioritize applications and reclaim resources
Instead, it’s best to prioritize applications based on business
impact, cost savings, or technology risk. Reviewing lifecycle
risk of hardware and software can help leaders automate
the identification of priority applications to retire, resulting in
cost savings and risk reduction.
There are also potentially significant ancillary savings tied
to underlying infrastructure resources such as hardware
and software. Reclaiming the now-unneeded infrastructure
that supported the apps being shut down helps recover
even more ROI.
| 8
 The growing role of application portfolio management

To do all these things, IT leaders need a robust tool that

helps them understand not only what’s running in the
cloud now, but also the estatewide implications of
removing an app. Pulling an app without realizing its
connecting tentacles across many workgroups can
severely impact innovation.

There’s a large interdependency among applications,

infrastructure, ownership, cost, and various parameters
that can introduce risks to app modernization for the cloud.
Underneath all this is a common data model that connects
across systems, understanding which apps are moving to
the cloud, which hardware and software they’re connected
to, and what are the cost implications.

Cost harvesting

As more organizations look at moving resources to the

cloud, it’s important to analyze which existing software
licenses can still be utilized. If you’re moving entire
workloads, you can estimate the cost of moving them to
different public clouds.

For instance, a cloud cost-management tool can:

• Estimate costs for moving licenses from on-premises to

cloud, such as bring your own license (BYOL)
• Build business cases for which resources to move to the
cloud, including considerations for utilization and software
and hardware end of life

• Estimate cost differences between different cloud

providers, including related costs for BYOL for existing
on-premises licenses

• Understand license compliance of the software running on

containers and provide automated ways to remediate

A truly robust cloud cost-management strategy can

help provide a way forward to moving resources to cloud,
tracking these costs (whether running one or multiple
clouds), and also getting deeper into software running
in ephemeral environments.

3 best practices for accelerating cloud transformation | 9


Scale cloud faster with process automation by:
• Automating cloud catalog requests, change,
and incident workflows
• Automating to gain cloud visibility across
the enterprise
• Improving employee productivity and experience
3 best practices for accelerating cloud transformation
Best practice 2:
Scale cloud processes faster
with automation
When it comes to scaling cloud adoption in the enterprise
and making it easy for users across the board to adopt
cloud, the biggest question from cloud center of excellence
(CCoE) teams is, “How can we automate processes for cloud
service delivery?”
CCoEs ask how do we get visibility into what’s running in
the cloud and across the enterprise, and then understand
and convey that back to the business or back to the
team? How do we do this in a way that is improving the
productivity and the experience for the consumers of
the cloud services, whether those are IT consumers (such
as marketing-team requests for new capabilities) or
developers who need to stand up a new team quickly?
Automate self-service processes
CCoE and the service operations team enable users to
request cloud services based on standard policies. These
policies are based on repeatable process and facilitate
auditing. Automate cloud requests, incident, and change-
management processes to avoid slowing users down when
they request cloud services. For example, automating cloud
requests from a catalog, tracking changes via APIs, and
maintaining visibility of services in one platform will drive the
best of both worlds: the process adherence needed for
large enterprises and the frictionless experience driven by
modern automation techniques.
| 10
 Gain dynamic visibility of cloud environments

After cloud services are provisioned via automated

tools, event-driven discovery provides visibility of your
infrastructure and applications across cloud and modern
stacks and automatically populates this data in your
ServiceNow instance. Along with cloud resources, tag
visibility and enforcement are extremely critical for these
dynamic environments because they help with deeper
visibility and resource mapping.

Look for a comprehensive solution that discovers—whether

via agent-based or agentless means or just connecting
via APIs—your resources across your cloud infrastructure,
including Kubernetes, containers, storage buckets, and an
entire ecosystem of cloud-hosted services.

Equipped with all this data, CCoE teams can create

business value and context to drive enterprisewide asset
management, security, compliance, cost management,
product and project management, and service operations
as they relate to cloud.

Cloud governance for greater cloud excellence

Cloud governance is the single most important aspect of

managing cloud processes. For CCoE teams, it’s important
to ensure that cloud deployments adhere to enterprise
policies, compliance, and security standards. If you are
worried about the wrong configuration of cloud resources
leading to perimeter or data breaches, cloud configuration
governance and security-posture management can help
by collecting the data from cloud resources, validating
this data against policy rules, identifying violations, and
finally, offering remediations to fix the issues. Housing these
tools within a single overall platform also helps govern
process, repeatability, policy compliance, automation,
and auditability.

A single view of all the applications across the portfolio is really

powerful...Most customers today are using spreadsheets or tools
outside the platform that don’t have a single data model.
– Max Aronin, Director of ITx Emerging Solutions, ServiceNow

3 best practices for accelerating cloud transformation | 11


Operate cloud services with resilience by:
• Predicting and preventing issues with AIOps
• Maintaining cloud governance
• Reducing risks with faster vulnerability response
3 best practices for accelerating cloud transformation
Best practice 3:
Operate cloud services
with resilience
The No. 1 question cloud ops teams have is, “Now that
things are in a cloud environment, how do we keep them
up and resilient, and how do we make sure everything
stays secure?” Operations is always one of the hardest
areas to modernize because critical services can never
go down, and this is even harder during transition to
the cloud because the mix of on premises and cloud is
constantly changing.
Put automation to work for you
Driving automation here is paramount, for example,
with artificial intelligence operations (AIOps), which can
automatically bring together data from on-premises and
cloud sources to prevent service degradation. It can also
provide security posture and assess policy and vulnerability
risks in cloud environments.
Any top-tier solution providing advanced AIOps for the
cloud should integrate with cloud providers’ monitoring
tools—ingesting and correlating events, metrics, and logs to
analyze them in a unified way. It should also drive efficiency
and predictability in analyzing anomalous behaviors and
patterns that might cause outages down the road, as
teams can perform a root-cause analysis to understand
which indicators and alerts are the probable cause of
the issue. Integrating DevOps tools helps teams analyze
configs and send alerts based on noticeable changes,
providing a much richer set of insights to act upon.
| 12
 Integrating cloud monitoring and observability with AIOps

AIOps for the cloud integrates with monitoring tools such as

Azure Monitor and AWS CloudWatch—correlating events,
metrics, and logs to analyze them in a unified way, driving
efficiency and some predictability in analyzing behaviors
and patterns that might cause outages down the road.

Teams can analyze configs and send alerts based on

noticeable changes by integrating to DevOps tools.
These alerts provide a much richer set of insights to
act on an issue.

Furthering the AIOps mission is embedding deeper

observability of the cloud-native environments. This might
be achieved via ingesting through open standards such
as OpenTelemetry or just pure intelligence by having
greater visibility and monitoring of cloud resources. But
for many customer-facing applications that require
tremendous latency service level agreements (SLAs),
traditional monitoring approaches might not be sufficient.
That’s where an innovative observability solution such as
ServiceNow Cloud Observability helps teams further scale
cloud adoption and resilience across cloud-native services.

Security and risk management are key

Security-posture management is essential for the ongoing

health and performance of cloud services. Look for a
solution that captures vulnerabilities by integrating with
container security products. A good solution should
enrich this vulnerability data with contextual information
(such as related hosts, Kubernetes clusters, services,
and namespaces) and track vulnerabilities against the
appropriate Kubernetes entity. This includes detecting
new vulnerabilities as new common vulnerabilities and
exposures (CVEs) are published, as well as automatically
marking vulnerabilities as closed/fixed by comparing
current and previous versions of container images. These
capabilities create an accurate, up-to-date view of the risk
posture of your applications and lets you prioritize resolution
of vulnerabilities.

3 best practices for accelerating cloud transformation | 13

 Create cloud agility and accelerate
adoption with modern workflows on a
single platform
Different parts of your technology organization need different things
to enable your cloud transformation. CTOs and cloud architects are
concerned about reducing costs and increasing ROI while putting
the right architecture in place for cloud success. CCoEs are focused
on scaling cloud processes with automation and governance.
CloudOps teams must ensure that everything in the cloud is done
with resilience and security in mind.

But overall, everyone wants to enable the modern architectures

that create great user experiences. Moving from legacy data center
processes and architectures to cloud-native operations helps you
plan cloud adoption, scale talent, rationalize apps, create self-service
catalogs for dev, and operate customer-facing services with central
visibility, development, AIOps, observability, and governance.
And when all of that is housed on a single platform, you get
maximum interoperability and visibility for your cloud-first
approach—an overall solution that enables business agility
and helps speed cloud adoption.

3 best practices for accelerating cloud transformation | 14

 Plan, scale, and operate clouds
from end to end
Can you manage cloud without compromising governance
and security? Yes. ServiceNow gives you the ability to
do it with our single platform—a comprehensive set of
capabilities that ease your journey to the cloud.

3 ways the Now Platform® accelerates cloud excellence

What do you get when you move from legacy processes

and architectures to modern workflows?

1. Detection of unmanaged cloud spend:Analyze daily

license usage and see cloud spend by business hours,
departments, and provider instances. Shut down apps not
needed in on-premises environments.

2. Remediation of cloud configuration errors in minutes:

Scan cloud configurations for tag violations and other
policies that may cause data breach issues. Use out-of-
the-box automated workflows to fix issues in minutes.
3. Ability to predict and prevent service issues:
Use observability to correlate events across cloud
environments and identify anomalies within the
application layer, resulting in a massive reduction in
mean time to resolution (MTTR) and more reliable
experiences for the end user.

3 best practices for accelerating cloud transformation | 15

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