5 Elements Your Cloud Infrastructure Needs to Enable Application Agility

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

A couple weeks ago, I discussed how cloud computing enables affordable agility. Automated provisioning and easy scalability make it possible, for the first time, for companies to experience infrastructure agility.
However, it’s a mistake to assume that agile infrastructure equals application agility (by which I mean both delivering applications into production more quickly and having those applications easily grow and shrink in terms of scale).

In fact, one commonly encounters IT personnel who assume that the mere fact of hosting an application in a cloud environment will magically transform it into an all-singing, all-dancing agile application. That’s far from the truth. Cloud infrastructure is necessary but insufficient to achieve overall application agility…

In order to achieve the nirvana of application agility, a number of other conditions need to be in place—principally relating to how the application itself is designed, deployed and managed—along with the organization and its processes surrounding the application lifecycle. Here are five elements that need to change along with the shift to cloud infrastructure in order to allow business agility to take place…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio.com/article/736592/5_Elements_Your_Cloud_Infrastructure_Needs_to_Enable_Application_Agility