At John Keells IT, digital transformation is a well-honed art form driven by cutting-edge technology built for the Mobile first, Internet first, Cloud first, Zero-trust first, and AI-first strategy with people who are passionate about what they do. People at John Keells IT believe in collaborating with their customers to drive co-innovation in co-creating their future which could ultimately empower and transform businesses to realize their true potential through a well-aligned strategy, blueprint and technology roadmap.
Zareer Sakoor, Head of Solution Consulting of Core Solutions and Services at John Keells IT
As a strong advocate of the Cloud as a platform for transformation, John Keells IT provides its customers with a secure, scalable, agile, resilient, and cost-effective platform to drive their innovation across their value chain, helping them to stay ahead of their competition.
In this series, Echelon speaks with Zareer Sakoor, Head of Solution Consulting of Core Solutions and Services as well as Bandara Dissanayake, Head of Solution Consulting of Cloud Solutions & Services as to how John Keells IT helps its customers realize these value benefits in partnership with globally established brands such as SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce, etc.
What are the key challenges enterprises face in building a solid foundation to drive Transformation?
Today most Enterprises are on legacy or homegrown applications that have lived their time and restrict their ability to drive the transformation that the businesses need. Some of the key challenges are,
- Compatibility Issues: Legacy applications may not be compatible with modern cloud infrastructure and technologies, making integration and migration complex.
- Technical Debt: Accumulated technical debt in legacy systems can slow down the transformation process and require significant resources to address.
- Limited Scalability: Legacy applications may have limited scalability, hindering the ability to adapt to changing business needs and handling increased workloads.
- Security Risks: Outdated legacy systems may pose security risks due to vulnerabilities that are no longer supported or patched by vendors.
- Skill Gaps: Finding professionals with expertise in outdated technologies used by legacy applications can be challenging, impacting the transformation efforts.
- Cost of Maintenance: Legacy applications often require high maintenance costs to keep them running, diverting resources from innovation and transformation initiatives.
- Integration Complexity: Integrating legacy applications with modern cloud services and platforms can be complex and require careful planning to ensure seamless operation.
By addressing these challenges through proper planning, modernization strategies, and leveraging tools like cloud-native solutions, enterprises can successfully drive transformation despite the presence of legacy applications.
How can businesses overcome the above challenges by embracing a Cloud-first strategy?
Embracing a Cloud-first strategy can help businesses overcome the challenges posed by legacy applications and drive successful transformation. The key value benefits of leveraging a Cloud-first approach are,
- Modernization: By migrating legacy applications to the cloud, businesses can modernize their systems, improve scalability, and enhance performance.
- Cost Efficiency: Cloud services offer pay-as-you-go models, allowing businesses to optimize costs, reduce upfront investments, and scale resources as needed.
- Security Enhancements: Cloud providers offer robust security measures and compliance certifications, helping businesses improve data security and mitigate risks associated with legacy systems.
- Scalability and Flexibility: Cloud services provide scalability and flexibility to adapt to changing business requirements, enabling businesses to innovate and respond quickly to market demands.
- Skill Development: Embracing a Cloud-first strategy encourages upskilling employees in cloud technologies, addressing skill gaps, and building a workforce capable of driving digital transformation.
- Integration Capabilities: Cloud platforms offer integration tools and services that simplify the process of integrating legacy applications with modern cloud services, reducing complexity and time-to-market.
- Innovation Acceleration: Cloud-first strategies foster innovation by enabling businesses to leverage advanced technologies such as AI, IoT, and big data analytics to drive competitive advantage.
By embracing a Cloud-first strategy, businesses can unlock the full potential of cloud technologies, overcome the challenges posed by legacy applications, and drive successful transformation initiatives.
What are the most common challenges in migrating to the cloud and how does John Keells IT address them?
The most common challenges in migrating to the cloud include:
- Data Security: Ensuring data security and compliance during the migration process and after the transition to the cloud.
- Cost Management: Managing and optimizing cloud costs to avoid unexpected expenses and ensure cost efficiency.
- Integration Complexity: Integrating existing systems with cloud services while maintaining functionality and performance.
- Skill Gaps: Addressing the lack of expertise in cloud technologies and ensuring a skilled workforce for successful migration.
- Performance and Reliability: Ensuring high performance and reliability of cloud services to meet business requirements.
John Keells IT addresses these challenges by:
- Security Measures: Implementing robust security measures, encryption protocols, and compliance standards to ensure data security throughout the migration process.
- Cost Optimization: Providing cost optimization strategies, monitoring tools, and governance frameworks to manage and optimize cloud expenses effectively.
- Expertise and Support: Offering training programmes, certifications, and support services to bridge skill gaps and empower teams with cloud expertise.
- Integration Solutions: Providing integration solutions, best practices, and tools to streamline the integration of existing systems with cloud services.
- Performance Monitoring: Implementing performance monitoring tools, service-level agreements (SLAs), and reliability measures to ensure high performance and reliability of cloud services.
By addressing these challenges proactively and leveraging their expertise in cloud technologies, John Keells IT helps businesses navigate the complexities of migrating to the cloud successfully. Further, at John Keells IT we have deep domain expertise and extensive knowledge of solutions that we deal with across SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce, AWS, GCP, etc as well as legacy modernization as well. We can take on both greenfield and brownfield projects across verticals and have done so with clients across the continents, which stands as testimony to our credentials.
In addition, continuous learning, R&D, and innovation are key priorities for us. We continuously invest in our people to up-skill and cross-skill our team members regularly, obtain new certifications and participate in technology forums to stay at the forefront of the technology landscape. We focus on time-to-value, providing the best technology solutions in the shortest time through rigorous testing and training methodologies. Dedicated support is provided with a core team assigned to each project, offering industry-specific knowledge and experience.
Our “train the trainer” approach ensures ongoing support from day one of the project going live, with handholding for at least a month and continuous support for at least a year. In addition to this, John Kells IT offers dedicated support services to serve businesses at any point it is required post the go live. Strategic partnerships with leading global technology providers build a powerful ecosystem of technologies, enabling us to offer comprehensive solutions to our clients. Through these strategies, John Keells IT consistently delivers successful technology integrations, helping businesses transform and stay competitive.
How does a Cloud-first strategy help to foster and drive innovation?
A Cloud-first strategy can significantly foster and drive innovation in several ways due to the inherent nuances it brings to an enterprise and they are,
- Agility and Flexibility: Cloud services provide businesses with the agility and flexibility to experiment, iterate, and innovate rapidly without the constraints of traditional IT infrastructure.
- Scalability: Cloud platforms offer scalable resources that can quickly adapt to changing business needs, allowing for seamless expansion or contraction based on demand.
- Access to Advanced Technologies: Cloud providers offer a wide range of advanced technologies such as AI, machine learning, big data analytics, and IoT services that businesses can leverage to drive innovation.
- Collaboration and Connectivity: Cloud-based collaboration tools enable teams to work together seamlessly across locations, fostering creativity, idea sharing, and innovation.
- Cost-Efficiency: Cloud services allow businesses to pay for what they use, reducing upfront costs and enabling investment in innovative projects without significant financial barriers.
- Rapid Prototyping and Testing: Cloud environments facilitate rapid prototyping and testing of new ideas, products, and services, enabling faster innovation cycles.
- Global Reach: Cloud services provide global reach and accessibility, allowing businesses to reach new markets, customers, and partners more easily, fostering innovation through diversity and collaboration.
By embracing a Cloud-first strategy, businesses can create a culture of innovation, drive continuous improvement, and stay ahead of the competition in today’s fast-paced digital landscape in the most cost-effective way possible.
Can you walk through a successful transformation journey that you have led across the value chain as elaborated above?
The best case study that we could put forth is the John Keells Group itself. The Cloud cum Digital transformation journey started in 2013 with the group migrating to Microsoft 365. Thereafter, the points of inflection of transformation took place in successive phases in embracing Microsoft Azure as a preferred platform of Cloud transformation which led to all captive, on-premises data centres being decommissioned as early as 2021 with almost 90% of our group’s IT services running off the cloud. This rapid transition to the cloud also saw the group leading the way in migrating their core applications such as SAP to Azure in 2018, early executor of an Advanced Analytics initiative across the group which was powered through Microsoft’s Azure Data Platform together with Data Bricks as early as in 2019 and Security Operation Center build on Azure Sentinel at its core as early as in 2020.
This gave John Keells Group the agility and nimbleness that it needed to drive innovation and respond to customer demands. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of John Keells Group’s subsidiaries had to scale 1000 times vertically to meet their demand and we were able to provision that capacity in a matter of hours and help them refactor same to scale horizontally in a matter of weeks. Such rapid scaling would be impossible with traditional on-premise platforms or purpose-built hosting providers.
What would you advise a Customer who wishes to embrace a Cloud-First strategy?
John Keells IT has more than 10 years of experience in driving a Cloud-first strategy for our customers across the region. Today, we engage with marquee enterprise customers across the region as partners of SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce, Siemens Digital, Cisco, etc. Built on our extensive experience, expertise and knowledge our recommendations would be as follows,
- Assess Current State: Conduct a thorough assessment of your current IT infrastructure, applications, and business processes to identify opportunities for cloud adoption and potential challenges.
- Define Clear Objectives: Clearly define your business objectives, expected outcomes, and key performance indicators (KPIs) for migrating to the cloud to ensure alignment with your overall strategy.
- Develop a Roadmap: Create a detailed migration roadmap outlining the steps, timeline, resources, and dependencies required for a successful transition to the cloud.
- Engage Stakeholders: Involve key stakeholders from different departments in the planning and decision-making process to ensure buy-in, alignment, and collaboration throughout the cloud adoption journey.
- Prioritize Security: Prioritize data security and compliance by implementing robust security measures, encryption protocols, access controls, and monitoring tools to protect sensitive information in the cloud.
- Build Skills: Invest in training and upskilling your workforce in cloud technologies to ensure they have the necessary expertise to manage and optimize cloud resources effectively.
- Start Small, Scale Fast: Begin with pilot projects or non-critical workloads to gain experience and confidence in cloud adoption before scaling up to more mission-critical applications and services.
- Monitor and Optimize: Continuously monitor performance, costs, and usage of cloud resources using monitoring tools and analytics to optimize efficiency, identify areas for improvement, and drive innovation.
By following these pieces of advice, customers can successfully embrace a Cloud-first strategy, drive innovation, improve agility, and unlock the full potential of cloud technologies for their business.
At John Keells IT we are committed to standing with you as your partner of choice in your transformation journey from strategy to execution every step of the way. We will help you build a 100% Cloud-based platform to drive your transformation powered by innovation most cost-effectively through scalable, secure, agile, and resilient solutions. We will empower you to be ahead of your competition in all spheres of your operation. We stand committed to your success!