The Cloud Trends Magnified
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Many organisations are planning to adopt the cloud platform for umpteen reasons- to achieve scalability, cost-effectiveness, dynamic and well-synchronised organisational structure and much more. However the fact cannot be ignored that technologies evolve swiftly and one needs to be cautious before moving ahead of the curve. Gartner’s report- ‘Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies’ places Cloud Computing at the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ phase (a phase that represents over-enthusiastic and unrealistic expectations from a technology). Cloud Computing is known to be in this phase since last three years. According to Gartner’s report, the next phase is the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ (When a technology fails to meet expectations).
"Organizations should make all efforts to avoid falling into this trough by carefully understanding and choosing correct aspects of Cloud Computing. Hence a systematic approach should be followed to ensure that the organizations move in the right direction right from the first step towards adopting the cloud platform."
- Mr. Nivas Nallanthi
(CEO, NebuLogic Technologies
Anticipate
An organization should be able to understand the importance and need for a flexible and elastic response from IT systems. The organization should know if the applications and the underlying infrastructure are scalable and reliable enough to take on constantly increasing workloads and should have the ability to absorb the spikes as well as agility to quick deployment.
To address these aspects the organization should map the challenges that could pose in the future. Some of the most unavoidable aspects count for:
- Does the present delivery structure qualify to deploy IT Services at the required speed?
- Are the daily IT operations consuming extra time and diverting the team’s focus from other more important activities?
- Is the organization able to tap the 100% potential of IT?
- Are IT assets and HR assets fully utilized?
Contemplating on the above posed questions can help formulate the vision for IT which can enable business to grow rapidly. The organization must anticipate the prospective challenges and growing needs for the IT functions which can support the organization’s growth. Apart from discovering the challenges the organization, must at the same time, look out for exploring the potential methods to address the challenges and realize their growth envision.
Anticipation should not be restricted to mere challenge analysing or realizing growth indicators, rather having a discreet and serious assessment of cloud’s current maturity and adoption level across industries can raise its potential value from the standard to spectacular.
Measure
Once the Anticipate Stage results affirmative, this stage propels the organization towards the following steps:
- Understand in detail the technicalities of the cloud such
as types of Clouds, what are the available cloud services, what can be the best suitable could for your organization, most reliable cloud services providers etc. Gaining knowledge for the delivery models and architecture models is crucial to understand answers to all the discussed questions. A thorough assessment into the organization’s current IT activities is also necessary before migrating to the cloud (Assessment here counts for Technical and Financial assessment).
Technical Assessment:
An exhaustive technical-readiness assessment of the entire IT landscape should be conducted to evaluate the readiness of the organization. Following are some of the determining elements for Technical Assessment Process.
Infrastructure: Higher the percentage of virtualized environment (infrastructure & application), the readier it is to be migrated to the cloud.
Process: More complex the governance processes for deploying services and applications, change requests, regulating policies for backup and archival, auditing, monitoring, managing and agreement of SLAs, greater is the need to migrate to cloud space.
Financial Assessment:
To get the nod from the decision-makers, it is imperative to conduct a comparative study of the finances this should include both direct (hardware, software) and indirect costs (energy consumption, carbon footprint), Tangible (quicker deployment of services) and intangible (client satisfaction, customer advocacy) incurred in running the business environment should be considered.