I was talking to a friend of mine, Steve Montague, the other day about the changes we’ve witnessed in the role of IT organizations and environments in our careers. While there certainly have been unbelievable changes with security, compliance, network and hardware capacity and capability over the last 20 to 30 years, our discussion centered on the role of the CIO and the shift of IT from the back office of the company clearly to the front office. It’s hard to imagine today that a little over 30 years ago the CIO position, if it existed at all, was in a relatively small number of companies. Back then IT for most companies primarily provided record-keeping such as the creation of financials, human resource records, the order to cash process, and inventory management. IT is now synonymous with the very fabric and in every organization, the core identity of the company. IT’s pace of innovation is growing exponentially, and I believe successful companies will evolve all aspects of their business to enable better customer experience and operational efficiency in a secured and seamless way.
CIOs are at the forefront of the headline grabbing technology adoption like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), the Internet of Things (IoT), Digital Transformation, Cloud Computing, and Cyber Security. In today’s age of hyper personalization and digital transformation, all companies have to evolve to deliver new applications and features to market faster, scale them smartly and operate efficiently to deliver delightful customer experiences. My friend and I agreed that the role of the CIO, now part of the company’s executive management team is one of the most important, changes in our technology environment over the last 30 years.
Steve is currently working with a company that is contemplating moving its applications to the cloud. He was lamenting the fact that while there are innumerable companies out there who offer to help migrate you or provide tools that help you migrate to the cloud including the major cloud providers, he could not find a platform solution that provided full life cycle management of before, during and post cloud management of business critical applications. The consulting methodology that I grew up using starts with an assessment, moves to planning, then shifts to implementation and full operation followed by ongoing optimization of the project. In research on my friend’s behalf, I too found it difficult to find a partner or platform that solved for all cloud life cycle challenges. I was introduced to Rajesh Reddy who is CTO and founder of a company called Matilda Cloud Solutions to understand their approach to cloud life cycle management. They’ve developed a full-stack solution covering enterprise workloads for before, during and post cloud transformation and ongoing operations extremely efficiently, in public, private or hybrid cloud environments.
Their platform is proven at scale with several clients including one of the largest wireless and telecom providers in the country.
Rajesh provided me a blueprint of their platform and I learned that their tool suite automates enterprise analysis, transformation design, migration, deployment & optimized management of the hybrid infrastructure with built in security; enabling institutions to realize business-aligned cloud strategy in a matter of days with guaranteed business results with all cloud providers i.e. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud.
The assessment module called Discovery which provides the customer with a tremendous amount of information about their current IT environment and its workloads for security, regulatory and financial compliance. Once the IT environment is discovered it can also help them model and cost, looking at every cloud provider, the most efficient approach to safely and securely migrate applications to the cloud. Their Discovery module looks at every workload, application and services in the IT environment and creates a complete inventory which would include release levels, licensing information and patch levels of all applications. It provides information about clusters, storage allocations and traffic throughout the entire environment. It helps identify security vulnerabilities, application performance bottlenecks, asset outages and much more. This ability to discover the entire application environment and display the compute and network topology including relationships usage statistics and service details would be critical to any company. In addition, the ability to cost the migration considering all of the major cloud providers including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud, provides the company with a tremendous opportunity to view all options before making a decision to undertake such a massive project. This Discovery module seems to be a very powerful starting point for any company thinking about or moving to the cloud.
Although this is the first module of their platform that I have investigated, I couldn’t help but feel that Matilda Cloud Solutions platform may have a very pragmatic approach for companies who are either thinking about cloud migration or already in the cloud to, in an extremely cost effective approach, discover critical IT environment, workloads and applications and set the stage for a better informed plan for whatever is next.
I was intrigued enough to ask Rajesh to help me understand the other modules (Post Cloud Management, Dev/OPS, and Migration) in more detail. I’ll cover them in another post.
