In a follow-up to his first blog ‘Cloud is a corporate strategy, not a tactical solution‘, GigaOm Blogger Mark Thiele presents cloud as a state of operations and not just an IT decision. The decision to move to cloud, according to Thiele, should be made by the entire business.
Cloud is a state of business, not just IT
For a legacy IT organization to adopt cloud solutions without significant organizational realignment and improved business participation, the benefits would largely be wasted. It’s akin to thinking you can put a modern 500-horse power engine in a 1970’s economy car and get all the same performance and protection characteristics you would enjoy in a 2012 model year luxury sedan.
In fact, the introduction of cloud without organizational improvements would likely increase enterprise risk and potentially cost. The real opportunity of a cloud operating model comes from the alignment of technical solutions, people, and process. So when a business opportunity presents itself, your processes and technology will seamlessly keep pace with the natural development of the initiative.
Keeping pace means more than just creating a new pile of IT resources quickly, it means a repeatable process that also provides the appropriate controls and governance in order to minimize risk to your business, provided at the appropriate value to the opportunity.
Many companies implementing a cloud solution completely miss the boat on their first pass. IT often focuses so hard on basic server provisioning that they lose site of the bigger picture. While server provisioning is interesting, it’s likely one of the smallest benefits. The real advantages are obtained by moving up the stack and giving the business the ability to deploy applications and solutions much faster.
The strategic use and management of cloud can help you scale your IT (and your business), but first you have to get your IT and business ready to scale.
Click here to read Thiele’s full article and learn more about contestability, IaaS, and complexity reduction