Navigating Cloud Value

Although there is a significant drive from the IT industry vendors to adopt "Cloud". To most organisations in Small, Medium or Enterprise, the dollars and cents savings are not adding up. If you are going to make significant changes to your business systems, you must get more value out of it. 

According to a survey by THINKStrategies in conjunction with iNetU.

Of the 358 respondents to our survey, 43% have had a failed or stalled Cloud project implementation. Of these, nearly half had cost overruns relative to their original budgets. Two-thirds had to change their Cloud environment from the original plan within a year, and more than 50% had to make a change in the first 6 months.

If the business questions cannot be answered as part of a strategy, it will be an expensive exercise, with poor delivery of services and potentially no positive outcomes or benefits for the business.

• Why are we moving to, or adopting the "Cloud"?
• Do we know our current systems and how they operate?
• Do we clearly understand the different types of "Cloud" and how we will adopt them?
• Is the reason in line with an overall business strategy, if so How?
• What is the impact to our users and their experience?
• How will this deliver more value to the business, and in what ways?

There are a number of organisations who have moved their IT Systems to the "Cloud". This was done without having answers to these questions up front. Let's look at the approach these organisations used and some high level results…

Moving infrastructure to the cloud in a like for like approach:

• The outcome was very inefficient and expensive.
• Moving systems without a clear understanding of how they interact results in unexpected challenges.
• Unforeseen changes to process due to lack of in-depth understanding of "Cloud Services" caused major performance challenges and downtime.

Re-Architecting their environment to support "Private Cloud", "Public Cloud" or "Hybrid Cloud"

• Having to re-architect their environment and methodologies on the fly to support this new environment with inefficient and Ineffective outcomes.
• The IT team systems and change management processes broke down due to lack of in depth understanding of the new environment.
• Limited or no development skills and understanding limited the adoption of cloud services. This caused poor inefficient structure, and inefficient use of cloud services.

Both approaches resulted in the following:

• Poor user experience, productivity took a backwards step and IT services moved from a proactive to a reactive footing.
• Business lost faith in IT services capability to deliver the required business services.
• Services delivered were not in line with the business strategy or expectations and required significantly more work and expense
• The end result was not in line with the business's strategy or expectations.

Although the "Cloud First" policy, or moving to the "Cloud" are considered IT initiatives; there are business factors which need to be addressed. Without the business questions answered, the project will more than likely not deliver value to the business.

To get a result which meets the business expectations and delivers value. Work with innovative organisations, who base the requirements on your business strategy and understand “Cloud”. They look strategically at how your organisation can optimise costs & improve the value of services by adopting “Cloud”.

If you are not going to get more value, why do it in the first place?

 
“Cloud” = Cloud Services, Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, IaaS (Infrastructure as a service), SaaS (Software as a service), PaaS (Platform as a service) and others etc…