Foundational Technologies for Reusable Shared Services in the Cloud

Multi-cloud environments are an essential part of many organization’s cloud strategies; however, managing these environments can cause complex challenges for organizations. A 2023 survey found that 85% of organizations currently deploy applications on two or more cloud infrastructure platforms.¹ For many of these organizations, the migration to multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments happened in an iterative and decentralized way, resulting in siloed deployments with disparate, incompatible foundations and services. The absence of a common operating model has led to a lack of interoperability, potential security vulnerabilities, and high costs from the implementation, administration, and maintenance of these multiple environments.

Building common foundational elements, which can be shared across departments and units at the very beginning of an organization’s cloud adoption journey, ensures cloud deployments are better positioned to scale with the organization’s digital transformation. Organizations that have completed or are partly through their cloud migration journeys can still greatly benefit from implementing shared frameworks, and early cloud adopters especially should reevaluate their existing frameworks with new tools and considerations. By centralizing these critical foundations and common services through a more robust and secure cloud strategy, organizations can realize significant cost and process efficiencies while accelerating future system investments across the organization.

Benefits of cloud shared services and technology foundations

• Improved interoperability
• Enhanced scalability
• Increased portability
• Cost optimization
• Augmented security
• Increased skills portability
• Engineering efficiencies
• Process efficiencies
• Improved management
• Enhanced observability
• Shortened time to market
• Reduced time for ATO approval (Public)

Building a strong technology foundation that supports shared services in cloud

Building a shared services and technology foundation for current and future cloud deployments facilitates the development of holistic governance, process, and cloud architecture frameworks for the entire organization.

To build strong technology foundations for cloud, organizations should consider the following:

Create a well-architected framework — Organizations should leverage existing, best-in-class architecture frameworks and landing zone implementations recommended by cloud service providers whenever possible, rather than rearchitecting solutions from scratch. However, their chosen architecture should respond to current vulnerabilities and evolve with the organization’s future hybrid-cloud deployment needs. That means organizations should focus on implementing policies and frameworks around things like data governance, security governance, and security boundaries between tools, while also ensuring that workload accounts are spread out for more flexible and efficient load balancing.

Develop a tool-adoption strategy — Before making initial tool considerations, organizations should thoroughly understand their organization’s business objectives and requirements around their cloud deployments to create a comprehensive technical roadmap that will help them onboard tools that will meet their needs well into the future.

Choose cloud-agnostic tools — By adopting cloud-agnostic tools, organizations can enable multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud buildouts, interoperability, and automation and simplify cloud management, while also ensuring their workforce has greater skills portability and flexibility should the organization choose to shift their cloud deployment strategy.

Consolidate inventory and infrastructure resources — Organizations should inventory their current cloud implementations to consolidate deployments and contracts, as well as streamline infrastructure management resources and practices for potential reductions in cloud spend and implementation complexity. For example, integrating DevSecOps can facilitate greater security and efficiency in development and deployment. Similarly, adopting infrastructure as code (IaC) processes can create efficiencies by automating the creation of environments to test and run applications. IaC automation can also help reduce resource lifetime, possibly reducing cloud cost.

Implement API life cycle management — Organizations should implement centralized phase-based practices and processes for API management, including evaluating, developing, securing, versioning, testing, deploying, monitoring, cataloging, and retiring internal and external APIs. That involves creating rules for every stage of the API life cycle and using tools like API gateways, developer portals, dashboards, and enterprise service catalogs to easily manage all APIs.

Establish an enterprise data catalog — As part of implementing shared services across multiple environments, organizations should create an enterprise data catalog to better understand what data their organization currently has, where it lives, and whether there are any privacy restrictions, sensitive data, or other data considerations when implementing shared services.

Build a data pipeline architecture — To prepare or leverage their data for artificial intelligence applications now or in the future, organizations should consider creating a foundational data architecture to enable compliant and efficient data transformation. A standardized data pipeline architecture would include DevSecOps processes for the entire data life cycle, data ingestion into a data lake or data mesh, transformation into structured data, and the application of AI to generate business insights.

Create reusable blueprints for implementing shared services — Organizations should create a cloud strategy for shared services adoption and then develop blueprints for implementing shared services across the organization to streamline the shared services and design parameters used. For example, an organization can create shared services for access management functionalities like single sign-on (SSO), zero trust, and multi-factor authentication, as well as—for information security functionalities like network controls—firewalls, and systems monitoring applications.

Develop a technical roadmap for implementation, consolidation and unification of cloud environments — Finally, organizations should develop a technical roadmap to support the implementation of their chosen foundational tools and shared services, and in some cases consolidation and unification of cloud.

Benefits of creating a shared services and technology foundation for cloud

The main benefit of building these shared frameworks is that they enable organizations to better integrate the design patterns of loosely coupled architectures that are asynchronous and evolving. These kinds of scalable architectures are more efficiently implemented and maintained through the robust technical foundations and reusable shared services discussed in this paper. These services and policies act as a common foundation for composable cloud migrations and digital transformations.

Organizations benefit greatly from shared services and strong technology foundations in the following ways:

Cost optimization — Implementation and engineering efficiencies generate financial benefits by rapidly building out solutions for cloud adoption, reducing costly procurement and authority-to-operate (ATO) processes, and monitoring spend more holistically. This can also greatly reduce the expense of future modernization projects.

Shorter time to market — Organizations can achieve faster digital transformations and time to market for digital products due to streamlined implementations and deployments.

Process efficiencies — Creating a common operating model and standardized processes and design patterns helps organizations find process and engineering efficiencies that can increase implementation velocity and reduce system management complexity.

Enhanced management and observability — A common operating model also facilitates standardized governance, security, and compliance policies while increasing visibility into organizational infrastructure spend, security, and performance.

Improved interoperability, scalability, and portability — Creating a shared services foundation through reusable services, foundations, and code facilitates a better balance of workloads across environments and improved scaling of deployments while ensuring organizations are not locked in to any one vendor.

Increased skills portability — Reducing technical implementation complexity narrows the scope of skills an IT workforce requires during and after cloud migration. This streamlines an organization’s workforce needs and allows them to more easily recruit, onboard, and reskill.

Guidehouse’s expertise

In order to take full advantage of cloud migration opportunities, organizations should develop foundational frameworks and reusable shared services to ensure the strength and scalability of their cloud strategy and investments.

Guidehouse has extensive experience architecting multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud shared services and foundational technologies for government and enterprise clients. Cross-functional expertise in specific industries, emerging technologies, and backend infrastructure helps Guidehouse develop tailored cloud services, including cloud implementation and management frameworks that support the scalability, robustness, and success of any organization’s cloud strategy while ensuring alignment with industry requirements and business needs.