Cloud needs to be Business agenda and not IT agenda

In last few weeks I met four CXO’s from different industries and different continents and one thing was common across all of them. Each of them were convinced that cloud needs to be in their IT agenda but were clueless on where and how to start. The issues faced by them were typically:

·       Our business is facing tremendous cost pressure and we are being asked to cut costs. I know cloud can help me in cutting costs, but how and where do we start from?

·       We want to go to cloud but business is skeptical of going to cloud. We can not afford downtime due to application unavailability.

·       Our business-critical applications cannot afford high latency, higher response times

·       How do we manage the industry regulations and the data security part?

·       We do not know the skills we will require when we move to cloud.

·       How will I manage my billing once we are in cloud?

What was amazing is that each of them believed that they need to start as early as possible but the organizational dynamics, different agenda of different stakeholders and more importantly without the complete buy-in from their business stakeholders they are not confident to start. Most of them ended up in saying that we need help from you to draw upon your organization’s experience with other clients who have taken this journey already. While the cloud providers are willing to help them navigating the journey to cloud, but skepticism is quite high.

·       Your organization is not the only one facing this dilemma, but your peers and competitors are facing similar challenges.

·       All these obstacles and issues can be addresses when cloud becomes the agenda for business and not IT

·       We as an organization can help IT by identifying and enabling cloud migration for the applications which are readily amenable to cloud and thereby get the business buy-in.

·       However, the organizational path to cloud migration will be a long one and we need to draw up a roadmap with proper risk mitigation plan to address the transformation in a proper way.

What are your thoughts?