February 16, 2022
Vinod PahlawatThe ongoing pandemic has made it clear that the cloud is not just a future aspiration- it is an urgent mandate at the core of the business. With a large amount of workforce expected to continue working remotely in the future, most organisations have either moved a significant portion of their workload to the cloud, or they already have a migration plan in place. The increase in the range of cloud services has led cloud service providers to offer business-focused solutions and deliver modules with business functionality.
However, before moving to the cloud, the most significant challenge faced by businesses is to come up with an adoption strategy before making any transition to the cloud.
Cloud Adoption- How Does it Work?
In order to make a successful progression to the cloud, you must keep a few critical steps in mind which are applicable for organisations of all sizes. These include:
- 1. Evaluation: Your executives and IT decision-makers should analyse the opportunities and challenges of employing a cloud strategy regarding the marketplace. Also, they must assess the data related to past cloud adoption.
- 2. Planning: Post evaluation, you must work upon drafting a defined cloud strategy, which may include choosing the platform or service provider. Moreover, a decision should be taken to select the public, private or hybrid cloud model.
- 3. Adoption: This stage is all about creating risk mitigation strategies. Your IT leaders should have a deep understanding of the network infrastructure, servers, software, and data stores for any future reiteration in the overall strategy.
- 4. Augmentation: Once you are done with the adoption process, it’s time to optimise the same. This can be done with the help of regular meetings with the executive team and developing new and improved solutions.
Cloud- An IT Enabler or a Business Capability?
At present, we look at the cloud as a way to congregate business competence, which gives the flexibility and the ability to experiment and develop diverse solutions. However, cloud adoption can be viewed as both an IT enabler and a business capability.
At first, the cloud provided an ingenious way for on-demand compute services with pay-per-use pricing. Nevertheless, it wasn’t the sole catalyst towards the digital transformation. Subsequently, public cloud providers added development services that helped build applications on the cloud, which minimised the development cycle. This, in turn, allowed faster iteration, thereby enhancing products and services. Today, the services offered by public cloud providers are coupled with other specialist services, including Blockchain, 5G, AI, and Machine Learning, capable of bringing a new level of change.
This advancement empowers organisations to produce business capabilities instead of only building IT systems. Businesses may rebuild processes and promote consistency by leveraging digitisation and multiple capabilities available on a utility basis from public cloud providers. Therefore, the cloud helps bring digitisation to the core of your business by positioning IT as a revenue contributor. In essence, getting cloud adoption into the core of the business strategy helps create a competitive advantage and allows the organisation to scale rapidly.
The Business Drivers of Cloud Adoption
As you discover the level of transformation cloud offers, certain business drivers impact the decision towards adopting cloud. Below are a few of them.
1. Reduced Capital Costs
Any enterprise with an on-premise data centre must procure hardware based on the business requirement. This hardware has a limited lifespan, and it needs to be replaced with a newer version after a specific duration. However, you need not bear this cost with cloud adoption since you only pay for what you use and release resources as per the need.
- 2. Enhanced Business Agility
One of the most significant drivers for cloud adoption is business agility and reduced complexity, thereby helping gain a competitive advantage. Businesses adopting cloud observe improved agility due to on-demand self-service and elasticity. Also, you may acquire and deploy the IT resources more quickly. Moreover, once the resources are deployed, you may scale them up or down as per the demand.
3. Improved Productivity
Productivity enhancement is one of the major focus areas for every organisation, and cloud adoption is the perfect approach to achieve the same. It enables robust collaboration, customer management, and project management, thus helping employees get more work done efficiently and quickly. Cloud-based tools such as instant messaging, information sharing, and conferencing are becoming a common feature of business. As a result, enterprises that had not considered cloud adoption earlier are planning for the same.
4. Rapid Innovation and Continuous Improvement
When braced with agile development practices, today’s cloud development environments enable quick building, testing, deployment, and up-gradation of applications. They have encouraged the perspective of rapid prototyping and then making big bets on what may work. Moreover, the DevOps revolution has transformed the development cycles focusing on an integrated approach. Therefore, businesses that adopt the cloud and DevOps can gain a competitive edge over their counterparts.
On that account, the business leaders who have not yet made cloud an imperative, it’s time to consider two questions:
- Where do you stand?
- Are you ready to begin?
Conclusion
While there are multiple advantages of cloud adoption, including enhanced productivity, efficient business operations and cost-savings, you must also consider the changes required in your operating model to benefit from the transformation completely. The cloud experts at Motherson Technology Services help you innovate better while minimising the risk and cost it takes to bring your cloud strategy to the market.
Connect with us now and learn more about getting started with the cloud.
About the Author:
A senior management professional with 3 decades of expertise in driving business strategy & business operations and a strong understanding of value chain at multiple industry verticals like Telecom, BFSI, Media & Entertainment, Manufacturing & eCommerce. Vinod has always been a synonym for customer centricity, dependable operational excellence, and exemplary leader delivering corporate objectives including aggressive organic & Inorganic business growth.
