A hyggelig #Cloud (part 3 of 4)

How to make sure your Cloud is balanced, healthy to your company bottom line and friendly to your staff

Cloud computing provides a huge opportunity to transform your company, offering considerable business agility, service improvements and cost efficiencies.

However, none of the above comes for free: you do need to craft a sound strategy and execute it well, keep costs under control and address the disruption killers. But most importantly, you need to invest into transforming people’s attitudes and ways of working.

Focusing solely on the technology without dedicating a significant amount of time and resources on transforming people's attitude, culture and skills, organisational change and process re-engineering can lead to negligible improvements. ( _Tweet me_ )

<DISCLAIMER>

In this post I will go through some of the ideas I’m most familiar with - it is really meant to be an introduction, call it a conversation starter.

In fact, it is not covering every problem and every solution out there: there are excellent deeper articles on the execution of cloud transformation. And a lot of experts around.

Enough disclaiming. Let's start.

</DISCLAIMER>

Last week we had a look at keeping #cloud costs under control, so you could optimize the journey to cloud in the most economically efficient way possible.

This week we will focus around the concept of agility and its intrinsic value.

Agility

Cloud agility is the ability to rapidly change an IT infrastructure in order to adapt to the evolving needs of the business. This is becoming increasingly important in today’s disruptive markets and in the way services evolve and are made available to consumers and businesses.

As we said before, utilization has a direct influence on costs. However, closely associated with utilization is business agility. Traditionally, high utilization reduces IT spend, but limits agility and negatively impacts innovation and business growth. Conversely, the cloud can provide significant savings and nearly infinite agility. The value of this agility is challenging to calculate so we tend to ignore it. That is a big mistake.

The business value of cloud is more about agility and utilization than any other cost consideration. Consider that the cloud provides you with the ability to provision and de-provision nearly unlimited resources as needed with complete control. This provides significant cost advantages and even greater value in the ability to quickly solve business problems without waiting for software and hardware procurement and installation. With the cloud, businesses can enter into new markets, accommodate new customers, avoid compliance penalties, or just move fast when they need to move fast, all while concurrently maintaining fully-utilized hardware and networking resources.

Cloud agility provides a huge strategic advantage and significantly increases a business’ chance of long-term survival.

Agility will depend on number of times that the business reinvents itself to adapt to market demands and the amount of money made as a direct result of changing the business.

Also, consider how different individuals at the same company view the benefits of agility: your perspective as a CIO will vary widely compared to how a Head of Infrastructure or Head of Engineering values their organization’s ability to change. Keep in mind that usually most successful companies are the ones that align on the strategic perspective generally in line with how CIOs view their organization’s ability to change.

Finally, do not forget that what’s more difficult to quantify is the value of countless ideas and projects that are started, only to be placed lower on the priority list because by the time the resources are provisioned, other initiatives have taken priority.

With the agility of the cloud, projects can be conceived, provisioned, and deployed within hours, allowing for real-time planning and execution. And this can not only be a recipe for survival, but a way to consistently being entitled to beat the competition. ( _Tweet me_ )

That’s all folks for today!

Next week we will look at how to keep negative forces away from your #cloud.

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I would like to thank J.R. Storment for valuable feedback on improving the quality of this post, especially in the area of cost optimisation: most of the topics described in this article are complex as entire Universes with bespoke physics laws, hence it is incredibly good and healthy to be able to get advice from subject-matter experts like J.R.!