Crisis situations challenge business continuity in every organization. Whether small or large, enterprises struggle with the need to both respond quickly and prepare for life after the crisis. Rethinking their IT strategy can help businesses meet internal and customer needs, but transformation isn’t easy.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, companies that have already embarked on their cloud-transformation journey have fared better, yet enterprises differ in their progress. As IT leaders recognize that the cloud has evolved from simply a means to cut costs to a foundational component of business continuity and responsiveness, how can organizations build resiliency by including the cloud as part of their digital transformation?
Executives reconsidering their IT strategies are increasingly looking to cloudify the entire IT landscape. In practical terms, this means:
- Enabling connections from any device (e.g. a BYOD approach) without compromising IT security policies
- Migrating from reliance upon employees only to leveraging the extended enterprise, inclusive of temporary teams, virtual teams and the crowdsourcing community
- Moving from monolith tools to cloud-based productivity tools that empower staff to develop and deploy anywhere (e.g. Cloud9 or Codenvy).
Incorporating the cloud as part of modern IT transformation involves four broad areas that can help build a resilient enterprise and navigate crises effectively. These four categories are:
- Infrastructure transformation: Migrating from physical servers and appliances to virtual (cloud) servers and appliances. This transformation enables cost optimization, license optimization/consolidation, and a pay-per-use approach for development and testing environments.
- Application transformation: By moving from off-the-shelf (COTS) product integration to open platform integration or cloud-native service integration, companies can take advantage of the architectural improvements associated with microservices and application consolidation.
- Workforce transformation: Evolving from a managed-services model to a crowdsourcing model can enable companies to benefit from access to a highly competitive resource, reduce their training costs and get multiple results for implementation, choosing only the one(s) most likely to achieve the intended result.
- Engineering/Operational transformation: Automating operational activities such as testing, activity tracking, workflow management, and user onboarding can bring many operational efficiencies.
By incorporating these four transformation pillars into their reimagined IT strategy, companies can build a resilient enterprise platform that can handle crises with minimal disruption. Such decisions also position the company to accelerate its digital transformation journey, helping it better adapt to market fluctuations and improve efficiencies while generating tangible cost savings.