The Cloud Way – For a Connected Enterprise

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence. Author: Atul Sood.

Cloud has catapulted into a position of prime importance in any IT strategy. Cloud enables enterprises to dynamically address business requirements. However, the transformation from physically centralised to virtually distributed IT environments often causes enterprises to be wary. Businesses are spread across diverse economic, financial, geographic, competitive, socio-cultural, regulatory and technological environments.

These are ‘stimuli’ and cannot be easily influenced. However, products, services, processes, procurement, pricing and promotions (‘responses’ as I would like to say) are within the span of control of a business. These are the vectors that drive decisions around infrastructure and the applications that support the business. In a certain way, we are referring to the common denominator for growth and competitiveness among enterprises…

However, over a period of time businesses accumulate vast legacy systems. This is also true for Information Technology investments. The sprawl can become so vast that often enterprises lose track of what they actually own. Worse, development takes place in siloes and over a period of time, applications do not/cannot talk to each other due to a lack of linkages. Business information is frustratingly difficult to access across departments and even more difficult to act on. Systems and processes become dangerously cemented, preventing businesses from addressing change quickly enough. Let’s admit it – IT doesn’t have the time to look back and fix anything; today, given the pace of change, it is on a treadmill with no stop-button…

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