Cloud 2017 - A Point of View
Imagine a scenario where a line of business owner and the chief digital officer plan, develop and release a new digital service to their customers within weeks.
A scenario that, a few years ago, would have been impossible, yet with the rapid acceptance of public cloud services, agile methods of continuous development and operation and the concept of microservices, this scenario is becoming the new normal within the savvy digital enterprise.
Cloud makes this shift possible because of the real time, secure accessibility to infrastructure services, with the winners in this brave new digital marketplace those that move from tinkering with the cloud to embracing it with open arms.
The building and operating of discrete microservices will also change the way the business interacts with the traditional IT department. Once the benefit of these discrete services becomes apparent and more and more are demanded to stay differentiated and competitive, there will be a move to create an internal cloud competency capability designed to embrace agile development and operations.
As the enterprise embraces cloud and matures its approach, there will be an inevitable realignment of the internal IT talent pool within the enterprise around cloud competencies and a build not buy approach for applications utilising cloud services will be the accepted strategic approach for all new services.
As for the IT service provider, the era of consumption economics will become a reality with the gradual disaggregation of typical managed services as they orientate around microservices or cloud native services designed specially to support lines of business. The ability to earn the right to provide these services will depend on the ability to prove capability in double quick time as long term contracts start to become things of the past.
The winners will be agile IT providers, massive scale cloud providers, the enterprise client who will be freed from long winded, frustrating IT contracts and ultimately the end users. 2017 will see this approach become the established norm for future IT services.
