Miha Kralj

Mastering the cloud is the grand business challenge of our time and the focus of EPAM’s latest research. We surveyed over 400 IT leaders that represent a cross-section of vertical industries: financial services, healthcare and life sciences, insurance and retail.

There's value—business value—lodged in the cloud! But to begin releasing this value, a shift in mindset is required. Organizations need to understand that cloud isn't just for IT people but for business leaders seeking to create an adaptive organization and apply the idea of composable business.

Is your IT ecosystem prepared for the transformation that cloud will surely bring? If not, you’ll want to listen to the latest episode of Silo Busting in which Miha Kralj, EPAM’s VP of Cloud Strategy, and Sandra Loughlin, our Chief Learning Scientist, will equip you to begin thinking about cloud operating models.

The importance of the cloud in any disaster recovery strategy is invaluable. The potential ripple effect of a service outage – because of a data breach – could lead to lost revenue, halted productivity and eroded customer trust. With the migration to the cloud, business continuity is now more than just disaster recovery.

Containers offer great flexibility in how we deploy applications in the cloud. A good thing that is too: modern applications require unprecedented levels of scale. This necessitates the ability to rapidly scale up in the face of heavy traffic, and to scale back down as the traffic lessens. It’s not uncommon for such applications to run on tens, hundreds or even thousands of servers in the cloud, responding to spikes in traffic, automatically healing themselves when failures occur, and being… Show more

Containers offer great flexibility in how we deploy applications in the cloud. A good thing that is too: modern applications require unprecedented levels of scale. This necessitates the ability to rapidly scale up in the face of heavy traffic, and to scale back down as the traffic lessens. It’s not uncommon for such applications to run on tens, hundreds or even thousands of servers in the cloud, responding to spikes in traffic, automatically healing themselves when failures occur, and being updated on the fly. Show less

Under the helm of new CEO Arvind Krishna, IBM is customizing its cloud strategy to support and sustain existing mainframe customers. The launch of a complete hybrid cloud solution is largely thanks to IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat in 2019, which made it possible to leverage the Red Hat OpenShift product for open-source containerization.

You started migrating applications to the cloud. You also began to containerize some of your applications to take better advantage of cloud server resources.
Now it’s time to really take advantage of the power of cloud application models. We’re going to take the first steps in becoming cloud-native.
To do so, we’ll continue what we in enterprise computing started years ago. We’ll tear down large, monolithic applications into their logical components.

Conventional wisdom holds that you should migrate your virtual machines (VM’s) in the data center directly to the cloud, in the so-called IaaS model. But is that really the best approach? Or is there a way by which you could gain more of the benefits of cloud computing – immediately – by moving your VM’s to containers?

In this article, we’ll describe the basics of containerized applications: what they are, why they are better suited for the cloud than other options, and how to create one. In subsequent posts, we’ll talk about some of the ways you can use containers to make modern cloud applications.

Enterprises everywhere are adopting new strategies to migrate their applications and systems to the cloud—but many are missing out on its true benefits as a platform for rapid innovation

Cloud has changed the world of applications. But what does the next phase of Cloud look like? One piece of the picture is serverless computing.
Serverless gives companies a powerful new way to help reduce IT operational costs, deploy services faster and be more responsive to customer demand.

Creating a comprehensive, accelerated cloud strategy for a complex or federated organization requires a disciplined approach—one that balances the need for centralized governance with the opportunity to innovate across all engineering segments within the enterprise. In this session, will follow the Walt Disney Company’s journey to create an initial cloud value hypothesis and cloud business case, and then develop a structured approach towards cloud migrations and a "cloud-first" operating model.… Show more

Creating a comprehensive, accelerated cloud strategy for a complex or federated organization requires a disciplined approach—one that balances the need for centralized governance with the opportunity to innovate across all engineering segments within the enterprise. In this session, will follow the Walt Disney Company’s journey to create an initial cloud value hypothesis and cloud business case, and then develop a structured approach towards cloud migrations and a "cloud-first" operating model. Attendees learn more about the key implications, risks, and considerations of the company’s cloud transformation program; see examples of reference architectures and implementation guides; and understand the required activities that contributed to the success of the program. The patterns presented are broadly applicable to complex organizations with global aspirations to make the journey to the Cloud. Show less

To kick-start cloud adoption, companies have first to figure out how to deal with four foundation blocks that enable accelerated transformation.

Accenture research shows that 84 percent of executives believe the IT organization is shifting from a traditional service provider to a service broker, offering everything as-a-service.

It’s something that nimbler companies already do. Consider StubHub, the online ticketing service, for example. The company did not develop its own payment capabilities internally. Instead it uses Braintree, a payment gateway provider owned by eBay, to process credit card transactions. Without making these… Show more

Accenture research shows that 84 percent of executives believe the IT organization is shifting from a traditional service provider to a service broker, offering everything as-a-service.

It’s something that nimbler companies already do. Consider StubHub, the online ticketing service, for example. The company did not develop its own payment capabilities internally. Instead it uses Braintree, a payment gateway provider owned by eBay, to process credit card transactions. Without making these types of changes, today’s traditional, hierarchical structure is too rigid to rapidly adopt the new technologies that are constantly evolving. So it’s critical for organizations to tap into an ecosystem of partners allowing for the best of scale and rapid change.

Successful companies will be those that can effectively migrate to a new operating model. The end result: responsive, agile IT organizations that lead the way toward future innovation. Show less

After launching several thousand EC2 instances in the cloud, we've learned that the key to running an IT fleet successfully on AWS is enforcing operational and economic discipline. As AWS service consumption grows, operational costs and overhead shouldn't grow linearly. Instead, IT should encourage new tenants that migrate from data centers to AWS to slowly shift toward a self-service delivery model and adopt the DevOps operations model. Creating and offering an AWS Cloud operations service… Show more

After launching several thousand EC2 instances in the cloud, we've learned that the key to running an IT fleet successfully on AWS is enforcing operational and economic discipline. As AWS service consumption grows, operational costs and overhead shouldn't grow linearly. Instead, IT should encourage new tenants that migrate from data centers to AWS to slowly shift toward a self-service delivery model and adopt the DevOps operations model. Creating and offering an AWS Cloud operations service catalog enables organizations to efficiently take full advantage of AWS' flexibility and modularity. T-Mobile, whose journey to AWS Cloud management started more than 2 years ago, uses a service catalog to enforce operational discipline in the Cloud. Their catalog is custom crafted for each Cloud-based IT workload. This session provides insight into the AWS Cloud operations strategy and its transformation, the creation of a Cloud operations service catalog, and how this approach supports reliable engineering on AWS. Show less

Effective automation depends on adequate insights collected from all the systems relevant to the service experience and business outcome you’re trying to augment. Insights from data is necessary to create opens paths to automated predictions and ultimately using machine learning, or artificial intelligence, as part of a full scope the as-a-service construct.

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is a structured guidance to support successful adoption of cloud platform in organizations of different types and sizes. The CAF enables organizations to maximize the positive impact and value that can be gained by adopting cloud platform. The CAF is based on experience gained in assisting many organizations to successfully plan, strategize and adopt the cloud platform. Additionally, the CAF references industry-wide best practices and frameworks and… Show more

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is a structured guidance to support successful adoption of cloud platform in organizations of different types and sizes. The CAF enables organizations to maximize the positive impact and value that can be gained by adopting cloud platform. The CAF is based on experience gained in assisting many organizations to successfully plan, strategize and adopt the cloud platform. Additionally, the CAF references industry-wide best practices and frameworks and methodologies such as COBIT, TOGAF and ITIL, and shows how they can support cloud adoption. Show less

Taking a "cloud first" approach requires a different approach than you probably had to consider for your initial few workloads in the cloud. You'll be diving into the deep end of hybrid environments, and that means taking a broad view of your IT strategy, architecture, and organizational design.
Through our experience in helping enterprises navigate this change, AWS has developed the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) to assist with planning, creating, managing, and supporting the shift. In… Show more

Taking a "cloud first" approach requires a different approach than you probably had to consider for your initial few workloads in the cloud. You'll be diving into the deep end of hybrid environments, and that means taking a broad view of your IT strategy, architecture, and organizational design.
Through our experience in helping enterprises navigate this change, AWS has developed the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) to assist with planning, creating, managing, and supporting the shift. In this session, we cover how the CAF offers practical guidance and comprehensive guidelines to enterprise organizations, particularly around roles, governance, and efficiency. Show less