10 February 2014 Posted by Andrew Bohling
Most enterprise IT organizations don’t focus enough on innovation, in large part because they spend so much time monitoring and maintaining their legacy systems. Their many tasks include managing IT service requests, finding ways to achieve cost efficiency, automating business processes, increasing operational efficiency, and generally keeping the lights on for the business.
Cloud computing introduces a new dynamic to the IT organization. While cloud computing offers new opportunities for expanding IT innovation, it is only natural for organizations to first consider cloud services in the context of traditional roles. For example, IT organizations see cloud computing and ask: How can I use these technologies to drive efficiency in my current environment? And how can I use them to do the same things I’ve always done? This mindset has led to incremental adoption of cloud services.
Incremental Cloud Adoption
Incremental adoption is characterized by the slow migration of services to the cloud in ways that support legacy systems, applications and processes. Many organizations simply start by moving some of their existing applications. In this case, the “lift and shift” method is a common entry point, where organizations use simple migration tools to move their applications without redesigning them.
Unfortunately, these applications usually aren’t suited for their new environment, or at least can’t exploit the cloud’s unique benefits. For example, legacy applications are typically built to scale up rather than out, so they can’t take advantage of the cloud’s massive scalability or consume only the resources they need at a given time.
There can also be negative repercussions from moving existing applications to the cloud. For instance, users may have to contend with new latency and performance issues as a result of accessing services over a wide area network. Therefore, the benefits of lifting and shifting existing applications to the cloud are often limited.
Is this incremental approach really the best way to take advantage of the cloud? Or is this just traditional IT wrapped up in a new package?
Regardless of the answer, there can still be benefits from using cloud services in an incremental way. For example, organizations can take advantage of more efficient spending models like pay-as-you-go pricing. In this case, organizations only pay for resource capacity when they need it, so they can avoid lofty capital investments in onsite systems provisioned for peak demand. They can also gain flexibility and agility benefits since the cloud provides more options for how, where and when they deploy and procure services.
But an incremental strategy still leads IT organizations to do the same old things, just in the cloud. What this approach does not do is help them pursue the new and imaginative possibilities that cloud computing enables.
Innovative Cloud Adoption
There is another approach to cloud adoption – one more focused on innovation – that does a better job of creating new opportunities for enterprise organizations. This innovative approach uses cloud computing as a foundation for building new services and delivering new business value. Combined with incremental adoption, innovative cloud adoption leads to much bigger rewards for both IT and the business.
Making the mental leap to innovative cloud adoption can pose a creativity challenge, and most IT organizations will need someone to help spearhead their efforts. In many cases, their chief information officer (CIO) will be the ideal person to lead the charge and encourage team innovation. CIOs already take a central role in formulating new technology strategies for enhancing their organization’s efficiency. It makes sense that they should expand their consideration to the business end of operations.
With support from the CIO, IT staff members should think differently about the ways they implement and use cloud services. From a business perspective, they should consider new methods for serving customer demand as well as new services for creating revenue. Developers should also be given the means to experiment more freely. At pennies per hour for compute instances, public clouds offer a remarkably inexpensive and convenient way for developers to test ideas and create new services.
Incremental and Innovative
The most important thing for IT organizations to realize is that cloud computing introduces new and often better ways of building and delivering applications. Apps designed specifically for the cloud can leverage its unique features. For instance, organizations can design applications that scale in and out using on-demand capacity to support fluctuations in customer demand; likewise, they can take advantage of massive scalability to serve peak demand during high-traffic events. And by hosting applications across multiple servers and availability zones, they can benefit from reliability and fault tolerance, as well as serve a more geographically dispersed clientele.
For example, mobile applications are an increasingly popular way for customers to purchase and use services. These applications often serve a massive base of distributed users with the number of concurrent users constantly fluctuating. Therefore, they require varying degrees of backend infrastructure. If organizations were to build their own systems onsite, they would have to make large capital investments in capacity to ensure performance during peak demand. With cloud infrastructure, they can simply procure capacity when they need it, and scale back in once demand drops.
IT leaders and staff members should not simply view cloud services as a means of running legacy applications and systems in the cloud. With a bit of creativity and innovation, cloud computing can deliver far more value to IT organizations and the businesses they serve. IT staff members have an opportunity to play a more integral role in their company by changing the way they view cloud computing and how they incorporate and utilize cloud services. Furthermore, they should choose a cloud adoption strategy that delivers breakthrough benefits in addition to the incremental benefits that are most commonly pursued. By combining an incremental approach with innovation, enterprises can enhance their legacy systems, develop new methods for reaching and serving their customers, and ultimately expand the value of their business.
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