Monday, May 11, 2015

What’s Holding Back Cloud Adoption

The real challenge to run an effective IT (hybrid IT with hybrid cloud ) is always about bridging the gap between Business Units and IT.

Cloud adoption is happening at a fantastic rate of knots and is impacting both at business and individual level. But just like any other technological transformations, it takes both strategy and methodology to move either IT infrastructure service or business applications to the Cloud. What could be holding back cloud adoption? And how to run a hybrid IT with hybrid cloud solutions as silver lining, not panacea?



CapEx to OpEx: Internet is building internal border, loud actually does seem to be getting traction across many lines of business within many industries. But it takes a while for an enterprise to make the transition from Capex to Opex. Assets on the balance sheet don't just go away overnight. It takes time to retire the depreciation from your budget, and not too many businesses are in a position to absorb new costs in addition to the existing ones, no matter how attractive the potential benefits.


Workload fit - Not every workload makes sense for cloud, no matter what the service or deployment model, and different enterprises in different industries have more or less workloads that make sense for cloud. In short, It takes planning to push the cloud envelop. So Hybrid IT well orchestrates all key business elements such as people, process and technologies, not just hybrid cloud, is the new norm. Over time, as more workloads are designed with cloud in mind, you will see a higher percentage of cloud adoption, but this will be evolutionary.


Governance and Control - Data privacy regulations multiplied by GRC concerns are the major barriers to adoption. Cloud definitely requires a change to your governance and control processes. While mature organizations know how to extend their governance and control domain, the less mature ones are not well positioned to absorb change or to go outside the four walls of the enterprise, and still be able to effectively manage the risk. If you're not in a good position to manage what you can't control directly or the way you always have, you are less likely to extend your risk profile. Data governance is an important aspect of overall governance, but it is a problem organizations had long before cloud. Cloud certainly exacerbates the problem, but through standardization and automation, it also presents businesses with tools to solve the problem.

Other inertia: Major shifts in IT technology always proceed at a slower pace than you might expect. There are lots of inertia reasons for this. Besides GRC, the availability of cloud apps, and the general disruption in the migration is probably a much larger factor. A factor in all these migrations is that costs are dramatically lower for the new technology. This means that much of the growth in revenue for the new technology is not really migration, but new applications that are now affordable, which were never on the older technology, because they were not affordable previously. The somewhat faster pace for cloud revenue growth is probably not due to faster migration, but faster rollout of new solutions, previously unaffordable stuffs. This is consistent with general observations that new technology/stuff seems to be arriving at an ever accelerating rate, but it takes time to make a friction-less transformation. In the end, cloud will be the dominant delivery mode.  


The real challenge to run an effective IT (hybrid IT with hybrid cloud ) is always about bridging the gap between Business Units and IT. Cloud does provide an unprecedented opportunity to breakdown the functional silo, brighten the shadow IT, increase business fluidity based on OpEx advantage, and improve the IT delivery speed via faster deployment, automation and agility.


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