Businesses today depend upon IT to drive innovation and enable accelerate competitive advantage. Increasingly cloud computing enables business to deliver new services, enter into new markets, get closer to customers, and make increasingly mobile and demanding employees more productive.
The most successful organizations use cloud technologies as a catalyst to put in place new systems and processes that free IT organizations to maximize not just operational metrics, but business results.
Reactive: Managing the Demands of the Business
A majority of IT organizations today still struggle to shift from a reactive mode of operations. Organizations in this environment face a growing tension with their business partners as inflexible IT systems and outdated processes prevent IT from satisfying the need for rapid delivery of new services and applications to advance the business. Reactive IT organizations face a classic challenge with approximately 70% of resources tied up in managing existing infrastructure and applications. The remaining resources are rapidly exhausted upgrading and expanding infrastructure, with minimum capacity left for building new capabilities to support new business opportunities.
Most reactive organizations find that cloud has entered the business opportunistically, with lines of business procuring infrastructure, developer services and applications directly from external providers. The primary driver for these purchases is time to market as the availability of on demand services provides buyers with immediate services delivered via innovative business models and self-service environments. IT often views these external providers as a threat both to the relevance of IT and to the standards for compliance, risk management and security that IT must support.
If IT is still early in adopting cloud computing, little shift in core processes, organizational structures or financial models has been made.
Moving Beyond a Reactive State of IT
In order for IT to shift away from this reactive environment, the organization can take specific steps to redefine the way that it operates and the technology it leverages for its foundation. Investments at this stage bring greater order to pre-existing cloud investments and work to ensure that the need for rapid innovation does not create silos of the future:
- Continue to invest in private cloud to build the foundation for an efficient, agile, reliable infrastructure.
- Establish a self-service environment to deliver IT services to stakeholders on-demand
- Expand to hybrid cloud for faster adoption.
- Embrace third party providers as a source of innovation
- Begin to identify the true costs of IT services
- Identify processes that can be automated
Read more about using cloud as an accelerator for innovation
