Everest Group lead analyst Jimit Arora looks at five factors that may determine successful cloud adoption inside the enterprise.
Last fall I had the respect of sitting at the selection committee for the inaugural ICE (Innovation in Cloud for Enterprise) Awards, sponsored by the Cloud Connect show and Everest Group. The experience taught me how large enterprises are adopting cloud computing in ways in which are usually compelling, sometimes surprising, and infrequently breathtaking.
The winner, Revlon, Inc., presented a majestic case for a way it leverages cloud to succeed in organizational transformation that reinforces competitiveness and consumer wallet share.
As impressive as each individual entry was, there have been five recurring themes that emerged around the enterprise cloud adoption stories we read. While under no circumstances scientific, they reflect what enterprises themselves report as important factors within the success in their cloud deployments.
1. Identify a compelling reason to step out of the relaxation zone.
We’ve examine the significance of senior management buy-in to be successful in cloud transformation. But what we present in the award entry submissions is that actually even starker: Senior management must believe that cloud adoption is important to organizational survival.
The high-level driver is perhaps among the ethereal themes we examine within the tech press: Service or product differentiation, moving to market faster with new services, or getting towards the shopper through big data analysis. However, the visceral driver is often primal: We try this or we are going to suffer by the hands of our competitors.
2. Tackle business challenges before taking over cultural or technical issues.
Organizational issues are real, and organ rejection can kill a cloud project. However the successful enterprises we studied needed to maintain another set of challenges first: the financial realities of procuring a brand new IT stack in an atmosphere where resources are usually severely constrained.
[What else can get it wrong when moving to the cloud? Read Top 10 Cloud Fiascos.]
3. Follow a multi-year, phased adoption roadmap.
This could appear obvious, nevertheless it merits mentioning because it is a universal marker for achievement. Enterprises that experience made cloud work for them mapped out a change agenda that during many cases spanned 3 to five years. And while they certainly took the time to check and validate each step, they started with real production workloads, not only dev/test. To be certain, these early workloads were non-critical, but they were live applications serving real customers throughout the enterprise.
This is an efficient place to show that successful enterprises don’t view cloud as private or public. They remember hybrid — defined because the ability to transport data and workloads to the infrastructure superb to the business objective at that moment in time — is a roadmap item. In other words, it’s component to the long-term IT infrastructure evolution plan, and they are not jumping in with both feet. Yet.
4. Cloud is the way to simplify the IT stack.
Twenty years of enterprise IT has resulted in a proliferation of IT silos, often with each supporting a small variety of applications in a dedicated stack. Since complexity consumes resources, IT professionals spend their time maintaining and troubleshooting various environments.
Eliminating this inefficiency was a standard goal of the successful entries we checked out. The winner, Revlon, undertook an aggressive simplification of its IT stack, leading to one DNS/DHCP, one directory, one network, one SAN, one hypervisor, one server image, one desktop image and one management toolset. Its results were impressive.
5. View cloud through lens of agility, competitiveness, not cost.
This point should remind enterprises that the numerous business benefits offered by the cloud are unlocked only when a transformational mindset is embraced. The choice to adopt cloud alone is not going to make sure the desired level of commercial impact. It’s perhaps instructive that few of the enterprises submitting award entries mentioned cost reduction as a major objective in their cloud efforts.
What’s the takeaway in all this? Two things: Develop a coherent strategy and vision to your cloud adoption journey, with a well-defined set of end objectives. This could have in mind the disparate needs of every business user segment. Then step back and consider cloud as a whole solution as opposed to a suite of silos or platforms.
That’s how the successful enterprises within the ICE Awards did it. Cloud objectives should transcend conventional considerations, cost reduction, and risk management. Instead, consider the business value of the complete solution.
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Jimit Arora leads the IT Services research practice, all for applications, infrastructure, cloud services, and next-generation IT. Jimit’s does research on banking, financial services, insurance, and healthcare outsourcing. Before joining Everest in 2005, he managed client … View Full Bio
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