CIO OPINION
CIO
opinion
“
CLOUD ADOPTION
IS NOT ABOUT MASSIVE
COST SAVINGS, THE WHOLE
APPROACH TO FINANCE
WILL NEED TO CHANGE IN
ORDER TO SUCCEED.
//////////////////
Bluegrass CEO Nick Durrant
Resistance to change
is the biggest reason
for failure
People are resistant to
change and this is the
main reason why cloud
migrations tend to fail,
according to Bluegrass
CEO Nick Durrant. He adds
that business leaders must
ensure their cloud strategy
is aligned with their
business goals, because
a lack of vision from
management and staff will
have an enormous effect
on the success or failure of
cloud migrations.
38
INTELLIGENTCIO
O
ld technology may keep the
business ticking over, but it
also severely inhibits change.
It also consumes budgets and limited
resources that should rather be spent
on strategic projects. Similarly, inflexible
architecture cannot scale to meet
changing requirements, so businesses
pay for unused redundancy to cope with
peaks in demand.
Even if businesses do have additional
funds available, old technology reduces
the scope for new deployments because
of interoperability issues. According to
Gartner, 80% of money spent on IT is
‘dead money’, used to ‘keep the lights on’.
Cloud adoption is not about massive cost
savings, the whole approach to finance
will need to change in order to succeed.
If it doesn’t, the migration project is likely
to fail. The pay-as-you-use cloud model
changes IT spend from Capex to Opex.
However, the switch to SaaS and PaaS
will need to be closely monitored and
controlled to prevent overspend. What’s
more, applications may need to be re-
engineered to take full advantage of PaaS
so that businesses don’t consume billable
resources unnecessarily.
Most companies simply do not fully
understand their current infrastructure,
which is a significant problem when
planning a migration to the cloud.
They lack a detailed asset inventory
for their data centre and do not have
easy oversight of hardware and
software maintenance contracts which
are often placed in limbo between IT and
finance, with neither party wanting to
take responsibility.
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