Financial realities are different: Enterprises chiefly adopt cloud for cost advantage. It is therefore critical for the project team to analysethe TCO and identify the actual cost vs. the perceived cost benefit (ex: pay-per-use vs. pay-per-consume). It is important to continuously monitor the scope and put in place effective change management measures.
Understand the requirements up front: Understand that organizational dynamics change over time. Hence it is critical to adopt an agile strategy for cloud adoption that responds to change faster and deliver incremental value. This approach helps fulfil SLAs and reduces development cost and time to market (TTM).
Jumping too quickly into technology:Green lighting the technology before having a finite idea of the requirements is a cloud disaster. SLA’s from the CSPs get ignored in the negotiations phase and any legal or penalty clauses are put on the channel partner of the CSPs who are much smaller in size compared to the CSPs. It is important to scrutinize the organizational objectives, set roadmap and spend quality time on drafting the SLAs which are mutually acceptable. Technology should be selected in consideration with future business prospective and long-term performance parameters.
Unskilled resources: Cloud requires different technical capability and skills to integrate with on-premise infrastructure. Till the recent past, resource deficiency was one of the major bottlenecks. Vendors and enterprises are now investing in skilling their resources through different certifications and live PoC demos.
A silver lining
The majority of CIOs are penning a Cloud First strategy for 2016.
The reason being infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is now used for almost all use cases including development and testing environments; high-performance computing and batch processing; internet-facing websites and web-based applications; and non-mission-critical internal business applications, hosted on virtualized x86-based servers.
CIOs of both enterprises as well as SME’s are looking at digital transformation and are under immense pressure to adopt cloud for business agility, productivity and profitability. Vertical auto-scaling is an ideal solution that helps borrow resources automatically from the cloud in real-timeand relieves them once the workload is not intensive.
As CIOs draw their IT strategy to embark on the growth path, cloud can disrupt and completely transform how business functions. Organizations can dramatically change the way they engage with customers, partners, vendors and truly stayagilein responding to business changes. Hence in 2016, cloud computing needs to be a core organization asset and change business dynamics.
