The Doppler Quarterly Special Edition 2019 | Page 42

How Cloud Starts
Cloud initiatives often start as “shadow IT,” with business units requiring better agility than cen-
tral IT can provide given their physical hardware inventory. As usage grows, Compliance and IT
staff become concerned over governance and security. They use the cost savings (“TCO”) over
internal or outsourced infrastructure and associated costs to build a business case to define a
larger, broader cloud strategy. Once companies migrate, they reaffirm that although hard sav-
ings justified the hybrid approach to compute, the real benefits are found in the soft savings,
coming full-circle to why businesses adopted cloud in the first place.
Agility: The Cloud’s Most Undervalued Benefit
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 dis-
ruptive markets and the reality is that many enterprises are plagued with IT infrastruc-
tures that are so poorly planned and fragile that they are limiting business growth.
Cloud agility provides a huge strategic advantage and significantly increases a business’
chance of long-term survival.
To help quantify the value of agility for your organization, start by breaking down its
three components:
1) Your degree of change over time
The degree of change over time is the number of times that the business reinvents itself
to adapt to market demands. While a pulp and paper production company may only
have a degree of change of five percent over a five year period, a technology company
may have an 80% change, and a company in a downturn market may have a 40% percent
change over this same period.
2) Your ability to adapt to change
The ability to adapt to change is a number that states the company’s ability to react to
required change. For instance, a large manufacturer may need to rapidly pivot in order
to take advantage of a new market opportunity, but may not have an IT culture that can
change at the rate required. Thus, they don’t have the ability to adapt to change, so, no
matter what you do to promote the use of disruptive technology like cloud computing,
they won’t be able to take advantage of it.
3) Your relative value of change
The relative value of change is the amount of money made as a direct result of changing
the business. For instance, a retail organization’s ability to rapidly establish a frequent
buyer program to react to changing market expectations, and the resulting increases in
revenue from making that change.
40 | THE DOPPLER | SPECIAL EDITION 2019