IT departments have come a long way in establishing their internal multi-cloud environment. They're now welcoming company divisions and offering a more cost-effective alternative to public cloud providers.
The role of IT organizations and their duties are often differentiated. Since the cloud is a disruptor, many IT companies have only learned recently that the business units for which they operate are the actual driving factor behind the innovation that customers need. More specifically, the cloud is a critical component of that progress. IT organizations have a well-coordinated plan that can meet the business need for strength and speed while also combining that with a versatile, light governance and enforcement structure that lowers risk and vulnerability exposure.
Moreover, IT cannot develop a strategy in isolation. It must acknowledge that it is one of several service providers to the company and that the business is pushing cloud requirements to providers who can manage them within the necessary timeframes and quality parameters. When they migrate to the cloud, the IT group's attention can turn to create a catalog of resources that their business units are seeking. Thus, a plan for a cloud portfolio that satisfies the requirements of all business unit stakeholders can only be developed by close cooperation between IT and the business units.
What Is the Aim of Moving to the Cloud?
It’s essential to determine whether your target is business mobility, speed to market, cost savings, versatility, or efficiency straight from the beginning. Remember that depending on the application design, functionality, specifications, and the contractual arrangements you sign up for, running workloads in the cloud may be more costly. Therefore, when deciding on your cloud strategy, there are four important factors to consider. Your business will arrive at a strategy by recognizing and focusing on these aspects which reflects what the organization as a whole wants to aid its clients and understand the effect on all stakeholders, as well as the IT technologies needed to track, handle, and sustain their cloud infrastructure.
1) Facilitating Cloud Governance and Service Management Capabilities
Support for the cloud is not dissimilar to that for on-premise in the way that you need the same competencies from staff. Even so, those tools must be associated with the cloud, which involves support skillsets. Without any significant integration and up-skilling, you cannot expect a conventional IT architect to step up to designing cloud applications. The same can be said about service management assembly: don’t require conventional development, event planning, or power management to be available.
At the outset of the cloud journey, preparations should be made to establish a governance structure, a Cloud Centre of Excellence, and employ a Cloud Architect. The latter is crucial in guiding the vision along with taking the lead in setting up policies and practices around the organization.
2) A Cloud Analysis Framework - What Must Be Transferred to the Cloud?
Using the cloud entails far more than subscribing to IaaS, PaaS and SaaS and expecting that the same assistance, adherence, and risk standards, or that the provider will manage them. A company must be able to decide which of its workloads should be transferred to the cloud. A decision system examines and grades workload across major areas that can serve as an obstacle or a catalyst of migration.
The cloud decision framework is often used to decide if the potential benefits outweigh the costs, and if the justifications and mitigating measures would cause a transition to take place. The operators were the most efficient in this case. Nevertheless, given the stakes, protection and regulation are given a lot of importance. Increased research should be conducted to define the issues and determine whether or not they can be resolved or remedied. The findings will decide if a public cloud may be used or whether the current scenario is the right option.
Furthermore, the structure must be applied to all of the company's strategic workloads and applications that have been listed as cloud candidates.
3) Altering the way you approach potential application portfolios
The majority of businesses lack a formal service portfolio management system. When migrating software to the cloud, businesses must reconsider how their customer-facing and revenue-producing applications and services will be handled over their development process.
The next point to remember for the portfolio is SaaS applications. A change to SaaS models can have an instant effect on performance and communication tools. The benefit of such modifications is that users are unaffected by the transition as they will use the same function that was previously provided by a different mechanism.
Now is also the time to think if can start with IaaS or PaaS to get immediate short-term benefits. You could start there and work your way up to cloud-native apps as your developers and architects gain a better understanding of cloud technology and the expertise required to fully utilize them. This is where the Cloud Centre of Excellence must intervene and steer the application portfolio trajectory, reminding developers of the advantages and drawbacks of attempting to migrate, re-platform, and recode.
4) Service Brokerage
Equally important is the current I&O organization's future position, which must develop into that of a service broker. When transitioning to a service broker, particularly for cloud services, the I&O organization must come up with the "safety barriers" for how the enterprise, business operations and developers can best utilize the cloud. Notably, they need to provide instructions about when and how to use:
• Public cloud services
• Private cloud services from public cloud providers
• Private cloud services that are managed and operated by service providers
This necessitates the development of a versatile service catalog that is supported by services from both internal and external providers. Regardless of who provides them, all programs must certainly be implemented simultaneously, with the same accessibility, efficiency and support levels. The I&O organizations enter this service assurance space as service brokers, creating a clear interface between all service providers and their own enterprises.
Conclusion
In order to become "Cloud Smart”, think about what it means for all stakeholders and what you'll need to implement in order to succeed. To truly become a cloud service broker to the business units, IT must be transparent on what to transfer, when to transfer, and how to move it to get the most value while minimizing risk, as well as creating the perfect cloud services portfolio.
Cloud computing will not disappear anytime soon and will play a larger role in supporting business needs for speed and agility. A cloud strategy must be well-aligned with those criteria, but also have a strong understanding of the implications for all stakeholders. This requires IT to move from on-premise service management to multi-cloud services, which has proved challenging to most. IT will ensure that business units truly understand the advantages of cloud computing by establishing a simple, shared strategy and a roadmap to strengthen it.
Want to find out how IT can ensure business units fully understand the benefits of cloud computing? Contact VUSE today to start your journey!
