Tapping Into Cloud: Three Quick Steps For An Enterprise To Adapt

– Madhavan Krishnan - Senior director and practice head

Cloud Computing & Leader - Millennial Solutions Group, Virtusa

It is now an established fact that cloud adoption in Enterprises is accelerating and the momentum towards cloud adoption is astounding. Though we are still in the early stages of cloud migration, it is both exciting and scary.

Cloud enabled IT will percolate to all parts of an enterprise in some form or the other. Enabling this massive shift are some of the underlying lead indicators:

-Wide spread movement of enterprise transformation to digital,powered by mobile, social and technology delivering personalized experience to meet the ever growing demand of super empowered consumers

-Every noteworthy tech company has an offering today which supports cloud with growing share of revenue from this offering

- Wide spread adoption of methodologies like ‘Design Thinking’ and ‘Agile Development’ requiring automation, self-service and rapid deployments that support short life cycles.

Restructuring an enterprise

In my opinion, the following considerations, among others, would need to be applied when reimagining the organizational structure of an enterprise to tap into the potential of cloud.

Decentralize adoption to unleash innovation

For a product / services organization, every department or a service offering should have cloud based variant of their offering to the market, if not the only offering. For instance, marketing teams should be able to put together a quick campaign before the launch of an upcoming product release. With cloud enabled technology and tools, the number and scale of such campaigns can be put together in days which hither-to could have taken months.

An applications management division or an Infrastructure management division of an IT services company should have a cloud offering to supplement their traditional services to take advantage of emerging opportunities in the space.

Federate governance

With a decentralized cloud adoption strategy comes the increased threat of security, governance, compliance among other issues. It becomes paramount to have a mode l of standards and governance for compliance teams to establish systems and processessuch that business teams do not have a problem complying with. The current CIO / IT organizations could become the custodians and enforcers of these standards without constraining the ability of the innovators in the customer front line. For a services organization, cloud governance board could be tasked with bringing the new tech-led innovations, repeatable best practices and platform partnerships which empowers and strengthens the decentralized adoption with proper checks and balances.

Embrace automation economy

With a massive move to cloud, governance, standards, release management and execution efficiency of Digital transformation projects cannot happen without widespread proliferation of codified and repeatable best practices around automation. A learning organization’s design should feed off from the operational data and fine tune the codified best practices around key business processes like release management, auto scaling, infrastructure and applications managementto name a few. The core team led by CIO’s organization could be leading the innovation around automation and data-led response to business needs.

In summary, the key to winning in today’s economy for an enterprise is to empower and unleash the creative power and innovation of its people to meet and exceed the expectation of clients. For this, enterprises would need an organization structure in place that is super empowering and encourages innovation without encumbrance of too many processes. Key to that is enablement of organization structure which increases the pace of innovation by having systems that encourage low cost, high volume and high value innovation, taking advantage of power of the cloud.