After more than 10 years of development of public cloud, all walks of life are competing to achieve digital transformation through cloud, and public cloud providers are also meeting the unstoppable trend of Amway public cloud through various online and offline promotions. It is reasonable to say that the general public should have a clear understanding of why they want to go to the public cloud. However, after visiting many large, small and medium-sized enterprises in 2018, they found that this is not the case. Many enterprises do not know the benefits of going to the public cloud. What is surprising is that many public cloud practitioners are also hard to explain to customers why they want to go to the public cloud. They have always emphasized the same three things: fast online, on-demand rental, and elastic expansion. Therefore, the author thinks it is necessary to systematically sort out the driving forces of public cloud on enterprises.
The public cloud mentioned in this article includes the public cloud based on shared resources provided by the cloud service provider's data center, the private cloud with exclusive resources, and the public cloud extension deployed in the customer's own data center (such as Huawei Cloud HCS Online, Azure Stack, AWS Outlets, etc.), which is the orange part in the figure below.
Figure 1: Deployment mode of cloud platform
From the business level, the consistent goal of the enterprise is business growth and sustainable profitability. Around these goals, business demands for quality improvement, efficiency increase, cost reduction, safety, innovation and compliance are derived. Note that these are business demands, not ICT demands. For example, cost reduction here does not only mean reducing ICT TCO, It is hoped to reduce the overall production and operation costs through digital transformation.
All activities of enterprises need to be carried out around these business demands, including enterprises' public cloud or private cloud. To talk about cloud without these business demands is to play rascal. We need to make two points clear. First, these business demands cannot be satisfied by ICT alone. They are more achieved by upgrading and optimizing businesses, processes and products; Secondly, at the ICT level, applications must meet these business demands, and these applications can be deployed on both public and private clouds. The importance and value of applications are higher than the underlying cloud network resources.
Focusing on business demands, the driving force of enterprise public cloud is divided into two aspects. One is internal driving force, including quality driving force, efficiency driving force, cost driving force, safety driving force, innovation driving force, assessment driving force and convenience driving force; The other is external driving force, including policy driven, model driven and preferential driven, as shown in the figure below.
Figure 2 - Driving Forces of Public Cloud on Enterprises
Internal driving force of public cloud on enterprises
1. Quality driven
Under the background of increasingly fierce competition in various industries, all enterprises are struggling to improve the quality of their products and services to meet the growing quality requirements of customers. If cloud access can meet the business demands of enterprises to improve quality, then cloud access of enterprises is a natural thing, and does not need too much guidance.
Huachuang Warp Knitting is a warp knitting enterprise in Haining City, Zhejiang Province. Through big data analysis on the warp knitting cloud platform, the enterprise optimized the production process, reduced the number of yarn breaking points of the original 70 meter long fabric from five to one, significantly improved the product quality, and successfully attracted high-end brand customers such as Shenzhen Dingshang, Youngor and Jiumuwang.
This kind of direct product quality improvement through the adoption of digital technology on the cloud platform is very desirable for enterprise users, but at present, public cloud providers generally do not pay enough attention to this kind of quality driving force at the business level.
In addition to the above quality drivers at the business level, at the IT level, the IT service quality and performance of the current major public cloud providers (such as Huawei Cloud, Tianyi Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud) are higher than that of the internal IT teams of most enterprises. Through the proven ICT infrastructure and continuous performance optimization experience, the public cloud can ensure the long-term stable operation of the business application system, Reduce the loss caused by business application system downtime.
Kuayue Express is a logistics service provider that pursues excellence. It is trying to promote the business of "cross provincial day to day", which means that Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs salvaged in the morning can be delivered to the dining table in Beijing at night. This ultimate business highly relies on high-performance and reliable logistics information system, so Tianyi Cloud provides it with a dedicated resource pool to deploy logistics information system, Access to Tianyi Cloud with the cloud dedicated line, and equipped with a dedicated service team, which effectively guaranteed the high performance and reliability of the system and escorted its rapid distribution business.
Figure 3 - High quality IT services provided by cross express through cloud platform escort its rapid distribution business
The key to expanding customers with the driving force of business quality is to find ecological partners from all walks of life and PaaS and SaaS applications that can bring quality improvement, and then try to deploy them on their own cloud platforms.
The key to using IT quality drive to expand customers is to polish the performance and reliability of the cloud platform. In this regard, major domestic public cloud providers have done a lot of optimization work. The public cloud of operators can also provide end-to-end SLA guarantee by combining the advantages of cloud private line and cloud private network. Both business quality drivers and IT quality drivers are applicable to all large, small and medium-sized enterprises.
2. Efficiency driven
If improving quality is the first axe for enterprises to cope with competition, improving efficiency is the second axe. To improve efficiency is to produce more products, provide more services and complete more effective work in a unit time.
If cloud access can meet the business demands of enterprises to improve efficiency, then cloud access is also a natural thing for enterprises.
A well-known car company attaches great importance to safety testing. Every new car needs 60 vehicle crash tests and hundreds of simulation tests, but the crash simulation time is up to 30 hours. To this end, Tianyi Cloud has built a dedicated HPC cluster with more than 10000 core CPUs, with computing power up to 10 billion times per second, reducing the original collision simulation time to 10 hours; At the same time, 4Gb cloud dedicated lines are used to make the cloud road of the simulation model smooth.
This means that auto R&D personnel can quickly upload a simulation model to the cloud HPC cluster when they get off work, and can get the analysis results the next day, greatly improving the speed of new car research and development. This kind of direct R&D efficiency improvement through cloud is also very desirable for enterprise users, but at present, public cloud providers generally do not pay enough attention to this kind of efficiency driving force at the business level.
Figure 4 - Famous auto enterprises use cloud HPC solutions to accelerate new car research and development
In addition to the above efficiency drivers at the business level, at the IT level, the IT service efficiency of the current major public cloud providers is also higher than that of the internal IT teams of most enterprises. For example, public cloud providers can complete the deployment and elastic scaling of IT infrastructure faster, so as to significantly accelerate the online time of application systems and win competitive advantages for enterprises.
The store distribution management system of a household appliance manufacturing enterprise manages more than 5000 stores nationwide. Due to the old system architecture, the horizontal expansion is difficult and takes a long time. After migrating to Tianyi Cloud, the highly scalable distributed architecture is adopted for design, and the expansion of one new service can be completed in five minutes to respond to business peak traffic in a timely manner.
The key to using the business efficiency driver to expand customers is to explore the bottlenecks in enterprise business processes, and then analyze which bottlenecks can be effectively solved through existing cloud products (one or more cloud products).
The key to expanding customers with IT efficiency drivers is to tap bottlenecks in enterprise IT processes, including deployment speed, expansion speed, software development efficiency, IT operation and maintenance efficiency, and then match the capabilities of existing cloud products (one or more cloud products). Both business efficiency drivers and IT efficiency drivers are applicable to all large, small and medium-sized enterprises.
3. Cost driven
The third way for enterprises to cope with competition is to reduce costs. Only by reducing their own production and operation costs, can they provide cost-effective products and services. The above efficiency improvement can also bring about cost reduction. The efficiency driving force and the cost driving force are closely related, but not the same. If it can meet the business demands of enterprises to reduce costs by going to the cloud, it is also a natural thing for enterprises to go to the cloud.
Taking Huachuang Warp Knitting as an example, Huachuang Warp Knitting used to collect machine operation status data manually, which was easy to make false reports and missed reports, leading to a large waste of raw materials. Later, the equipment was put into the cloud through the Internet of Machines transformation, and the machine operation status data was gathered in the cloud for analysis. On this basis, scientific production scheduling was carried out, which increased the utilization rate of raw materials by 2% to 3%, It is equivalent to saving 50 to 60 tons of raw materials in one year. Enterprises reduce production and operation costs by using digital technology on the cloud, which is the benefit that enterprises yearn for day and night. However, at present, public cloud providers generally do not pay enough attention to this cost driver at the business level.
In terms of IT cost, considering the total cost of ownership (including construction cost and operation and maintenance cost) of IT in three years, the use of cloud services can generally save 10%~20% compared with self built IT, and can also transform the enterprise's Capex in the IT field into Opex, which is meaningful for enterprises with tight cash flow.
A chain enterprise has 1000 stores. According to 10 employees in each store, it needs 10 office desktops, 1 AP and 1 VPN connection. The total cost of a single store's IT office environment in three years (including construction costs and operation and maintenance costs) is about 88000 yuan. 1000 stores is 88 million yuan, which is a heavy cost burden. After renting cloud desktop and cloud Wifi services on Tianyi Cloud, the corresponding operation and maintenance costs are saved, which can reduce the IT cost of a single store by about 10%.
Figure 5 - A chain enterprise reduces IT costs by using cloud services
The key to expanding customers with business cost drivers is to find ecological partners from all walks of life and PaaS and SaaS applications that can reduce production and operation costs, and then try to deploy them on their own cloud platforms. The key to using IT cost drivers to expand customers is to calculate and compare the total cost of ownership of self built IT and renting cloud services. Leasing cloud services can usually save the total cost of ownership of IT.
However, if the cost of using cloud services is higher, public cloud providers need to reflect on the competitiveness of cloud service prices, and force themselves to improve the efficiency of cloud platform operation and maintenance, reduce the cost of operation and maintenance, so as to reduce the price of cloud services. Both business cost drivers and IT cost drivers are applicable to all large, small and medium-sized enterprises.
3. Safety drive
According to the research report, accidents in most work scenarios can be prevented if they are found in time. At the Microsoft Build 2017 conference, Workplace Safety was launched, which uses cameras and cloud video analysis technology to monitor the working environment 24 hours a day. When danger is found, managers can immediately remind them, so that they can deal with the danger in a timely manner and avoid irreparable losses caused by further expansion of the danger. Such solutions to help enterprises effectively deal with business security issues are favored by enterprise users.
At the IT security level, all major public cloud platforms have deep accumulations, including end-to-end security technology systems, including host security, data security, firewalls, DDos emulation, situational awareness, etc., complete security management processes and specifications, and a large team of security experts to ensure the security of cloud platforms at all times, Therefore, compared with the internal IT teams of most enterprises, the public cloud has more powerful information security assurance capabilities.
If some enterprises want to build the same security guarantee capability in the private cloud, the cost must be much higher than the cost of using the public cloud security, because the former's investment in information security can only be borne by itself, while the latter's investment in information security can be shared equally among each enterprise user.
The blackmail virus in 2017 led to the disconnection of 20000 gas stations, which also just confirmed that the information security guarantee capability of many large enterprises is insufficient. The Supreme People's Procuratorate deployed its 12309 procuratorial service center portal on Tianyi Cloud, focusing on the comprehensive security protection system of the public cloud to ensure that the website is not attacked and tampered with by the outside world.
The key to expanding customers with the driving force of business security is to explore the business security issues of enterprises, such as safety production issues in petrochemical workshops, steelmaking workshops, construction sites, mines and other places, and then analyze whether these business security issues can be effectively forewarned and responded to through existing technologies on the cloud platform, We can cooperate with partners to customize security solutions for enterprise customers based on the cloud platform.
The key to expanding customers with IT security driving force is to constantly polish the security hard power of the cloud platform, and reduce the cost of using public cloud security for a single user through economies of scale.
Different industries pay different attention to business safety. Generally, industrial manufacturing, mining and construction industries encounter many safety production problems and cause great losses. These enterprises hope to eliminate or reduce safety risks.
In the field of IT security, it is mainly large enterprises and Internet companies that attach great importance to information security. Large enterprises worry about attacks on external service websites, and Internet companies (e-commerce, games, videos, portals, social networking, etc.) worry about attacks on their core systems by hackers and competitors.
4. Innovation driven
Today's enterprises are facing a fast changing world. First of all, in the context of consumption upgrading, customer needs are changing rapidly, and the requirements for quality are getting higher and higher, from high-definition video to 4K video, from the next day to the same day, from ordinary hair dryers to Dyson curling sticks.
Secondly, the new technology level is endless. Leading enterprises begin to use cloud computing as a production tool, big data as a means of production, AI to improve productivity, and blockchain to improve production relations.
Finally, the business model is also undergoing great changes, from the original B2C business model to the C2B model of user demand driven production, from selling products to selling services.
How can enterprises cope with this rapidly changing world? The answer is to quickly adopt new ICT technologies and new business models, and take the road of innovation. The public cloud is the fastest way for enterprises to acquire new technologies.
Figure 6 - Huawei Cloud EI Service Product Panorama
Taking Huawei Cloud as an example, there are currently about 45 EI (Enterprise Intelligence) cloud services and 142 functions, including speech recognition, speech synthesis, face recognition, character recognition, NLP, video understanding, etc. In addition, it also provides enterprise integration platform ROMA, blockchain service BCS, IoT platform, intelligent edge platform, etc. All these new technologies are readily available to enterprise users, allowing enterprise users to fully focus on business innovation rather than building technology platforms.
It is conceivable that if an enterprise needs to spend a lot of money and time to build these new technology platforms, it may not be easy to build a new technology platform, but it has missed the best innovation time window. Therefore, embracing the massive new technology dividends provided by the public cloud is the best choice for enterprises to innovate at the moment.
Yunlu Technology is a service provider focusing on health monitoring solutions for large-scale infrastructure construction. It is the first to introduce Internet of Things and artificial intelligence technologies in the field of health monitoring for large-scale infrastructure construction. It has developed a new generation of structural health monitoring and early warning system by using new ICT technologies such as big data, EI, Internet of Things, intelligent edge computing of Huawei Cloud. This system can be analyzed and identified, Timely discover the potential safety hazards of the building, and give early warning in the embryonic state of the possible danger of the structure. The system successfully predicted the collapse accident of a project in Qingdao in December 2017, avoiding a large number of economic losses and life safety losses.
Figure 7 - Large infrastructure health monitoring
The key to using innovation driving force to expand customers is to provide various new ICT technologies needed for innovation, and to be able to solve various technical problems encountered in the process of innovation with enterprise customers.
Innovation requires constant trial and error. Ordinary enterprises are difficult or unwilling to bear the cost of trial and error. Therefore, the driving force of innovation is mainly applicable to the leading enterprises in the industry. These enterprises have the desire to constantly pursue new products, new services and new models, and are willing to bear the cost of trial and error to avoid being caught up by peers or widening the gap between them.
5. Assessment drive
Has the annual IT budget achieved corresponding benefits? To what extent does IT support business development? Did the highly paid IT team produce corresponding high performance? These problems have long plagued enterprises, making it difficult for CEOs to evaluate the performance of internal IT teams.
Therefore, it is suggested that enterprises deploy part of their business systems on the public cloud, which can be used as a benchmark for IT performance assessment to assess the performance of internal IT teams. On the one hand, let enterprise leaders understand the advanced IT performance level in the industry (public cloud can basically represent the advanced IT productivity in the industry); On the other hand, encourage the internal IT team to output better performance.
The key to using the evaluation drive to expand customers is to discuss the difficulty of IT performance appraisal with the CEO of the enterprise. Be careful when discussing such topics with CIOs. Most CIOs oppose using the public cloud as the IT performance benchmark to assess their teams. The driving force of assessment is mainly applicable to cost sensitive medium and large enterprises. Small enterprises usually do not have a dedicated IT team or only 1-2 people do IT operation and maintenance work, so there is no need to assess their performance.
6. Convenience drive
If something is within reach, people can't help asking for it; If it is simple and easy to use, people will use it frequently. AliCloud has deployed more than 200 cloud POPs around the world to make it easy for global enterprise users to access AliCloud locally; Tianyi Cloud has one resource pool in every province of the country, and some provinces have two resource pools, which is also to facilitate enterprise users across the country to access Tianyi Cloud nearby.
People who have used Alibaba Cloud should have a feeling that its user interface design is simple and easy to use, and many considerations and optimizations have been made in the user experience. People with some traditional IT experience can apply for and control cloud services without training, which greatly reduces the threshold for enterprise users to use cloud services, and users are willing to use them frequently.
The key to expanding customers with convenience drivers is to improve the ease of use and accessibility of cloud platforms. First, users can easily and happily complete the opening and operation of cloud services through a simple and easy-to-use self-service portal. Second, enterprises in every region and city across the country can easily access the public cloud through resource pools and POP points. The convenience driving force applies to all large, small and medium-sized enterprises.
External driving force of public cloud on enterprises
1. Policy driven
The Chinese government may be the most diligent government in the world. It is also broken hearted for enterprises to go to the cloud. From the central government to the local government, it has continuously issued various preferential policies to encourage enterprises to go to the cloud. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released《 Implementation Guide for Promoting Enterprise Cloud (2018-2020) 》The guide clearly points out that by 2020, cloud computing will be widely used in enterprise production, operation and management, and 1 million cloud enterprises will be added nationwide.
Figure 8 - The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the Implementation Guide for Promoting Enterprises to Cloud (2018-2020)
In terms of local government, Zhejiang Province issued the "Three Year Action Plan of Zhejiang Province for Deepening the Promotion of" Enterprise Cloud "(2018-2020), which requires 400000 enterprises in the province to go to the cloud by 2020, and decomposes the task of going to the cloud to each city. Hangzhou also released the" Three Year Action Plan of Hangzhou City for Deepening the Promotion of "Enterprise Cloud" (2018-2020), Further, the task of cloud deployment has been broken down to all districts and counties within the jurisdiction, as shown in the two charts below. Other cities and regions have also formulated their own three-year action plans (2018-2020) for "enterprise cloud deployment", and the task has been broken down to all districts and counties.
In terms of incentives, Zhejiang Province proposed a joint incentive mechanism of "enterprises give a little, cloud service providers paste a little, and the government makes up a little", encouraged cities, districts and counties to develop local "enterprise cloud" assessment and incentive measures, and encouraged conditional places to promote more enterprises to cloud by means of government purchase of services.
Figure 9 - Cloud target task breakdown table of enterprises in Zhejiang Province
Figure 10 - Breakdown table of enterprise cloud target tasks in Hangzhou
Guangdong Province also released《 Several supportive policies of Guangdong Province to support enterprises to "go on cloud platform" and accelerate the development of industrial Internet (2018-2020) 》By 2020, 200000 enterprises in Guangdong Province are required to "go to the cloud platform", and the cost of "going to the cloud platform" for enterprises will be greatly reduced in accordance with the principle of "platform reduction, government compensation, and enterprise contribution". I won't list the policies of other provinces. You can search through Baidu.
During 2018-2020, the government should pay close attention to enterprises going to the cloud, formulate specific goals, plans and subsidy policies, and set assessment requirements for relevant responsible departments within the government. The financial subsidies for going to the cloud are mainly municipal and county inputs, supplemented by provincial awards. The government's goal is to realize the digital transformation of local industries through enterprises going to the cloud, improve industrial competitiveness, expand industrial scale, and ultimately boost local GDP and employment.
Both enterprises and public cloud providers should pay close attention to this wave of policy dividends. For enterprises, they can go to the cloud and enjoy the technology dividends on the cloud at a low cost. For public cloud providers, they can quickly open the local market with the help of the policy.
The key to expanding customers with policy driven force is to seize the validity period of the policy. If the period of 2018-2020 is missed, there may be no preferential policies later. Public cloud providers should actively form partnerships with local governments (mainly municipal and county-level governments) and industry associations within the validity period, build regional cloud platforms for local enterprises based on public cloud resource pools, and strive for more policy subsidies to flow to regional cloud platforms on the premise of helping local governments complete cloud tasks for enterprises. The experience of several regional industrial cloud platforms built by Zhejiang Telecom in 2018 is worth learning.
2. Example driven
In the field of industrial manufacturing, the informatization investment of the vast number of small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises accounts for about 0.2%~0.5% of enterprise revenue, and the bosses of enterprises do not have enough knowledge of informatization. In this case, the informatization construction of enterprises is mainly to keep pace with peers, Enterprise bosses usually find out in small circles such as peer gatherings what information system Lao Li's factory has recently used and has achieved good results, and then follow this system.
The idea of informatization construction of small and medium-sized chain enterprises in the field of food, clothing, housing and transportation is also similar. As a result, the restaurants in the whole food street are using the same catering management software. Large enterprises usually have professional IT teams to plan, design, select and build IT systems, have their own customized needs and construction rhythm, and will refer to the model of IT construction concept but will not copy specific IT systems.
The key to expanding customers with example driven force is to find opinion leaders in the industry, who can provide them with preferential or even free cloud services, create a model for industry informatization, and play a role of model for other enterprises in the industry.
It should be noted that the scope of this demonstration role is difficult to exceed the small circle of the local industry, which may only cover one prefecture or city, or only one district or county. It can be combined with the construction of the regional cloud platform mentioned above to create a local industry informatization model, and create a trend of using cloud from point to area.
3. Preferential drive
The incentives include government subsidies and promotional discounts for public cloud providers. Government subsidies have been mentioned in the policy driven part above, and will not be repeated here. More common than government subsidies are cloud product promotions by public cloud providers, such as Double 11 promotions, new user discounts, limited time offers, special areas, and two free for 10 rentals.
For small and medium-sized enterprises and swing enterprises with relatively tight funds, preferential promotions can really stimulate their use of cloud services. However, it is basically useless for large enterprise customers. Large enterprises have their own business rhythm and processes, and will not buy cloud services just because of discounts.
Figure 11 - Preferential Activities of Huawei ECS
The key to expanding customers with the incentive driving force is to establish a complete enterprise user profile. Based on a deep understanding of enterprise business and IT, the discount strength, products involved, targeted user groups, and effective period of the discount should be designed. The discount measures should be designed in combination with the current product inventory, new product launch time and other factors.
summary
Among the above driving forces, the quality driving force, efficiency driving force and cost driving force directly point to the enterprise's interest points, while the safety driving force, innovation driving force and assessment driving force directly point to the enterprise's pain points, while the convenience driving force, policy driving force, example driving force and preferential driving force behind are the itch points of the enterprise.
The driving force for most enterprises to go to the cloud is not just one of them, but a combination of driving forces of interest, pain or itch. As a public cloud provider, it needs to constantly polish its own products and solutions to truly help enterprise customers achieve the goal of improving quality, efficiency and cost reduction. Otherwise, these driving forces are just water without a source and trees without roots.
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