As a technology leader in Silicon Valley, I always wonder whether we take the innovative cloud approaches here for granted, yet the real value of the cloud is so compelling I still find it hard to understand why there is still resistance anywhere. I’m constantly reminded that there are many CIO’s who are still slow to adopt the cloud or not taking advantage of its huge potential. Yes, regulatory hurdles can’t be taken lightly, nor is it a straight forward endeavor for very large companies with a lot of legacy applications. However, this doesn’t mean that CIO’s should use those challenges as reasons to not move to the cloud as much as possible. Take Office 365 for example. At this point, no CIO should feel that hosting their own exchange server adds anything to their business bottom line. Eliminating non-core IT activities like hosting your own email service needs to to be a primary goal for CIO’s as we focus on activities that directly help grow the business. Moving to the cloud is critical for true IT effectiveness as it brings a business focus to the IT organization, provides business agility, increases security, reduces organizational upgrade costs, and enables innovation.
Business Focus – Moving to the cloud gets the IT organization out of managing the infrastructure needed to run and manage the business technology. On the application side, going with a SaaS first mantra reduces the development and customization efforts of the IT organization. The SaaS industry is mature enough today that many of your application needs are available in some form. Yes, you can’t just move off your legacy application overnight, but with a SaaS first approach, you replace the legacy applications as they reach their end of life. You might end up going with a platform that does require some configuration and modifications, but the efforts involved are much less than doing the development yourself. Managing the code and the related upgrades are eliminated or greatly reduced. Additionally, the hardware required to run these applications no longer become your worry and the time savings lets your team focus on activities that directly impact the business strategy. On the pure infrastructure side, what business value is there is owning and maintaining your own hardware? Yes, most organizations are highly virtualized now, but moving to an IaaS driven model is much more than just having a virtualized environment.
Increased Agility – In today’s fast paced world where new disruptive competitors are quickly popping up everywhere (thanks to the cloud, btw), increasing your agility capabilities is critical, and the cloud goes a long way in achieving that strategic objective. Every start-up I come across runs their business in the cloud (mostly AWS), so why does it work for them and not for the enterprise? Whether it’s M&A activities, calendar based spikes in customer interactions, or even steady growth, you’ll never be able to respond to big strategic business shifts as easily as you could by leveraging the cloud.
Greater Security – There is a lot of buzz about the potential security risks of using the cloud, but the cloud in fact increases your security capabilities. This doesn’t mean you ignore where you data sits or you don’t ensure employees treat your data with security in mind, but the capabilities in place for securing this information in the cloud is typically greater than what you could do yourself. I’ll never be able to afford (nor find) the talent needed to secure my infrastructure as well as many of the cloud vendors can. Security and reliability is the foundation for their business and they have the resources to stay on top of it in ways you could never do. Most of the significant security breaches these days are with companies that run their own data center.
Reducing Organizational Upgrade Costs – In a true SaaS environment, the periodic (typically semi-annual) upgrades require significantly less effort and testing. They’re done with very little fanfare and with very little impact on the customer. Contrast that with on-prem software that requires not only the oversight and testing of the software, but also the infrastructure. For internally developed and customized applications, it’s even worse. The upgrades can be extremely time and resource consuming, extracting a huge cost to the organization.
Enabling Innovation – The time and effort required to stand up and implement most cloud applications is a fraction of that for onprem or customized apps. Additionally, the functionality and availability of new and innovative business solutions popping up daily is a huge innovation enabler. The use of cloud apps and infrastructure greatly increase innovation when fostered and embraced.
Notice one thing that’s not on the list? Cost! Cost should not be top reason for moving to the cloud as an apples-apples cost comparison is only relevant when considering the factors above, plus other intangibles. Don’t get sucked into the cost trap.
If you’ve been slow to adopt the cloud, it’s time to move and increase your IT effectiveness.
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