Align IT with Mission Critical Business Needs
Decide on Whether to Develop the Cloud in-house or Outsource
Long Term Savings Outweigh Short term Costs
Implementing the Cloud
 |
| To outsource or in-house development that is the question |
The cloud has promised to revolutionise the way IT services
are delivered for all sizes of organisations.
With the development of Office 365 and other services such as Dropbox,
to Enterprise level design and development, cloud computing has taken off for
all kinds of business. If you are
thinking of shifting your business to the cloud, here are some aspects to take
into consideration.
Short term vs. Long term costs
Initially, the cloud may induce a big hit to your
budgets. However, once you consider your
moving from an inflexible monolithic infrastructure to a fast dynamic
infrastructure which can be tailored to the strategic needs of the business, it
is not hard to see why the short term costs can stack up.
Once the cloud is in operation the reverse is true. Gone are
your needs for big capital expenditure to refresh the hardware every year or
so. Instead of your teams 'making do'
with bulky under performing servers and software which does the job but can
hardly be called efficient, you will have dynamic bespoke applications which allow
collaboration by design.
You will also have a range of choices where cloud
applications are concerned, as many of which you pay for as you use, or by
user.
Restructuring IT Services
To enable cloud efficiency and reap the benefits of having a
more agile workforce and lower operating costs, you have to look at your
current IT structure and make key decisions.
A cloud infrastructure works at its best when it is aligned to business
needs. This is the ultimate goal. With this in mind let's look at some options.
Developing the Cloud Infrastructure in-house
Designing the cloud infrastructure in-house can be a good
option if you feel the workforce is flexible enough to take on new concepts,
new ideas, and retrain. Traditionally,
IT people are quite rigid in their focus, and have predefined roles. Personnel are often deployed to keep servers
running and applications functioning.
Much of the software they maintain is off the shelf applications.
Now the environment is dynamic. Fluidity and flexibility is key. Businesses can develop their own bespoke
apps, and personnel around the world can access it and work. Project collaboration can be in real time,
despite the team members being miles and miles apart. Using the power of business aligned applications,
it is possible for team leaders to identify progress and what stage a project has
reached.
Business support is also greatly enhanced, as a guy in the
field can ask for information from support teams, who can simply data-mine it
and provide it to him or her. The field
operative can then access this information on a standard smartphone if need
be. In fact the field operative can do
this simply by accessing relevant docs if time differences mean support is not
an option. All of this is just barely
scratching the surface.
Although in the business world we think of new projects and
restructuring in terms of costs, to transform to the cloud it is more a
question of will. Does your organisation
have the will to implement the cloud?
Outsourcing
Outsourcing cloud implementation is another option. Plenty of businesses have sprung up
facilitating this service from giants such as IBM to smaller organisations
consisting of teams of professionals.
Microsoft Azure is an enterprise level cloud platform which has reseller
package option. Quite a few smaller
businesses now implement this to help organisations switch to the cloud.
In many respects, a combination of the two might be the best
option. This way, you get the benefits
of the cloud faster, and your existing IT infrastructure can be adapted and
trained to take on the new dynamic roles they will need to keep the business
running.
If you have any questions on the cloud, please contact me or
kick off the discussion below.
No comments:
Post a Comment