To compete and thrive in the face the market challenges, organizations need to embrace Digital Reinvention. Over the past two decades, businesses have worked through a digital Maturation. As digital technologies emerged, companies progressively digitized processes and functions as they transitioned from analog to digital.
Digital Reinvention goes much further. Combining multiple technologies, including cloud, cognitive, mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT), Digital Reinvention rethinks customer and partner relationships from a need-, use- or aspiration-first perspective.
The enterprise Visionaries and leaders of the industries have tendency to achieve their objectives better than their peers by doing things differently. They breathe the opportunity and grab itto implement as result they are usually the pathfinders for new markets; and they accelerate away from competition by creating efficiencies.
Cloud provides an ultra-flexible way to run services and try out new things without jumping through the usual hoops of IT provisioning.
CIOs need to carefully plan, evaluate their cloud Journey
How can your organization define its successful path to the cloud? Here are some of considerations that needs to be done, when investigating before moving to the cloud.
Identification of Business and specific objectives to achieve
Today’s scenarios Cloud computing has become so much hype, with many marketing compaigns most of CIO wants to ride on the big wave. It is very important to know your strategy and business objectives to achieve.
What’s more, when moving to a public cloud, some organizations simply accept an out-of-the-box or cookie-cutter version of a cloud provider’s SLA, This is a common mistake that stems from the misconception that the cloud automatically provides scalability, resiliency, reliability and recoverability.
Cloud computing has multiple flavors it is imperative to know which one suits your objective.
Cloud Computing Offerings that needs critical evaluation before way forward.
Alignment with an open cloud reference architecture can help your CIO deliver on the promises of the cloud while using a stair-step approach to cloud adoption – from on-premise to hybrid to full cloud computing. Some companies find their own path by constantly reevaluating their needs and shifting their focus when necessary – making the move from running a data center to delivering real value to stakeholders, for example.
Service-level agreements
It is very crucial to ensure cloud providers meet expectations and objectives that you are expecting. A strong cloud SLA may not just be an answer. Organizations should not only negotiate SLAs, but understand their impact from both a technology and legal perspective.
But most comforting cloud exhaustive service-level agreement and both the parties trying to put one of the major clause for the cloud provider is the promise to keep your applications up and running 24hrsX 7 days, avoiding headache of data center management and skills management.
Scalability
Most common mistake with cloud installation is determining the exact performance issues. It is always very difficult to assess reason for system performance degradation. Especially if a business develops an application in-house and then deploys it to the public cloud, IT must be able to distinguish potential infrastructure issues from application issues. This helps the organization determine whether the cloud provider — or its own application design – or its bandwidth is responsible for degraded performance or other issues. And
Although we all know the “Cloud infrastructure provides the ability to scale an application horizontally, but only if the application is architected to leverage that ability.
Accelerate processes and optimize cost.
Recognizing exceptional business growth, organization needs embark on a path to major transformation that powers greater agility and competitiveness. It is very important to choose the solution that best meets organization needs, and implement and support it moving forward. It is always easier to leverage on to cloud, that enables to support the chosen solution, ongoing maintenance, training, and system issues as they are the responsibility of cloud provider. This really helps relinquishing managing the infrastructure and skills resourcing to help focus on the core business.
Harnessing tactical and strategic opportunities
It is always difficult to train or deploy right resources for a short duration. Cloud makes it possible hire right resources from any location of world. For such opportunities cloud allows your strategic business to secure infrastructure as well as recruit and onboard those hard-to-find resources by applying a managed services contract to run your cloud model.
In summary it is absolutely necessary that the consumer of cloud services needs to know exactly how the service is going to be used and best possible advantage is exercised from the service. Similarly the provider needs to ensure how this is provided to consumer. The selection of Cloud computing decision has to be taken with careful consideration and stringent review/understanding of service level agreement. There is need to consider control mechanism, monitoring of services used, aggregation of data and application of different sources, cloud deployment and lifecycle. There needs to be absolute understanding and disclosures between the provider and consumer.
By: Rajeev Pradhan, Vice President – IT, Arshiya International
