FEATURE
THERE ARE MANY
WAYS TO DELIVER
FLEXIBILITY, BUT
THE CLOUD IS A
PERFECT VEHICLE
IN LOTS OF WAYS.
companies still maintain on-premises
applications, data and other resources
and the trend is very much to hybrid
environments where enterprises spread
the load across traditional on-premises
IT, private cloud, public cloud, co-location
facilities and classic outsourcing. Some
watchers suspect that the journey to
enterprise cloud is only 20% completed.
Quite understandably, CIOs and others
have elected to operate on a ‘horses
for courses’ basis where workloads are
matched to deployment models based
on risk levels, information sensitivity,
intellectual property, performance needs
and other concerns. But I believe that
the current pandemic is an event that
will see a significant tilt towards broader
cloud adoption.
The world has changed
After COVID-19, it seems unlikely that
we will immediately go back to a
reliance on cities, crowded roads and
transit systems, offices, galleries and
stadia that place individuals cheek by
jowl with others. Remote working will
surely rise and that makes cloud an
even more attractive proposition than
ever before.
Organisations will need to re-think
operations, processes and Business
Continuity, and they will re-engineer
business models as they adapt to new
realities. In retail for example, shoppers
will want different experiences from
crowded shops and high streets. That
may mean broader pavements, longer
shopping hours, limited numbers of
people in-store and new ways to pay
without cash.
As Mark Kleinman, Professor of
Public Policy at Kings College London,
has written:
“Almost overnight, many of the benefits
of large, global cities have become
vulnerabilities. What was previously
greatly desired – crowds, proximity,
connectivity, openness – everything
that contributes to what economists call
‘agglomeration benefits’ and urbanists call
‘vibrancy and vitality’ – is now feared.”
We don’t know exactly how big such
changes will be or how long they will
persist but it seems likely that they
will mandate unprecedented
organisational flexibility. If they hadn’t
already realised by now, companies
will need to be more flexible, adaptive
and agile, so that the next time there is
a massive interruption to ‘business as
usual’ there can be no excuses.
Already we see companies that have
been anchored by legacy systems failing
to move fast enough and respond to the
new realities of virtual business. And this
in turn will complete the tectonic shift in
favour of cloud computing.
36 Issue 18
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