To thrive in the ‘new normal,’ IT and business must unify around a cloud.
With an impending economic downturn, flattened IT budgets, and remote teams, it’s more crucial than ever for businesses to get their cloud strategies right.
Early signs imply that company decision-makers are reconsidering their cloud usage. Approximately 85 % of firms, according to IDC, are trying to repatriate cloud workloads for financial or security reasons. Shadow IT, unanticipated SaaS alternatives spun up by the line of business (LoB), and the financial expense of virtual machines left on or underused are other challenges.
Furthermore, some businesses have been reported to ‘panic buying’ cloud collaboration software.
This is an incredible opportunity for IT executives to take a break, reflect, and ensure that their IT teams are on the same page as the business when it comes to the cloud.
Here Are Seven Suggestions To Get You Started:
Ensure That IT & Business Goals Are In Sync
Alignment is more difficult to achieve than it seems. Following COVID-19, recent research showed a significant shift in priorities, possibly separating IT and LoB connections. Technology leaders six months ago were more concerned with connecting IT activities with business goals and promoting business innovation. They’re now focused on cost containment, operational efficiency, and IT rationalisation.
So, how do you bring IT and business stakeholders on board with cloud adoption? It all begins with early involvement. Incorporate enterprise project managers and business units into the IT strategic planning process so that they can describe and justify their goals. To bridge the gap between business and IT, consider forming a combined team. You might also hire a strategic business relationship manager to help you bridge the gap.
Finally, if you don’t close this gap, your cloud approach will very certainly fail. You’ll need to create a business case that lays out the company’s long-term benefits and strategic advantages of moving to the cloud. If you treat cloud migration as merely an IT endeavour, you’re already dead — you simply don’t realise it.
Prioritize Your Strategy Depending On The Expected Value
Retire, retain, rehost, replatform, replace, restructure, and reimagine are the seven Rs. The 7Rs framework is useful for prioritising which apps to move and when to migrate them. There is no unique migration approach that works for every company. Strike the correct balance between your industry’s strategic business significance and the complexities and risks you’ll face.
Communicate Regularly
You must keep business managers on board when things get technical, answering their questions and explaining the technology element as you go, regardless of how you bring your IT and business teams together. However, even the most skilled IT staff must grasp higher-level business views and goals to optimise their efforts and assure favourable business outcomes.
For instance, the company may be concerned about security, risk, governance, customer experience, supply chains, or competitiveness, thus IT should be aware of this. Indeed, some technology professionals believe that IT departments should be more aggressive in their collaboration with business units.
Collaboration With Other Business Units Is Essential
As a senior business leader, you must ensure that everyone, especially other business units, is informed on cloud migration. Rapid digital change has accompanied the epidemic, which may generate scepticism among IT professionals – particularly when it comes to implementing technology that alters corporate working methods or workflows.
Collaboration with LoB, on the other hand, will aid in the reinvention of processes, the identification of new business prospects, and the promotion of improved working practices.
Include All Of Cloud's Additional Value
One of the most important benefits of cloud computing is its potential to facilitate company agility and innovation. However, that value is the most difficult to incorporate into a cloud migration business case or programme since it is dependent on many factors, including end-to-end organisational changes, learning how to innovate, and developing the necessary technological muscle. Remember that the cloud has a long-term, beneficial influence on company performance.
Have A Similar Coherent Strategy
Leaders in technology and business must develop a long-term strategic strategy that incorporates both perspectives. This is where IT executives need to have a seat at the table, so they can better align their strategy with the company.
Cloud strategy can be driven by IT or business stakeholders. Once the IT staff is on board and aligned with the business, they can act as catalysts for transforming the culture of the company, bringing major long-term benefits including cloud scalability, business agility, and quick time to market.
Reconsider Your IT Objectives
Quality of service, connectivity, automation, workload efficiency, and agility are all common IT objectives for the cloud, which may be achieved using DevOps and DevSecOps approaches.
To ensure that these goals are translated successfully, you should re-evaluate them against the company’s vision. A better customer experience or retention, as well as an increase in productivity among home-based workers, may be required to achieve the company’s objective. As a result, you may need to link cloud KPIs like utilisation, latency, and dependability to business goals to keep them grounded in the real world.
Ultimately, a successful cloud strategy necessitates a tight collaboration between business and IT. This will help you better manoeuvre the post-pandemic marketplace by providing cloud services that benefit everyone.