Cloud Computing has today become an inevitably important aspect for major digital businesses. The cloud computing market has been growing in recent years. So much in fact. that it is estimated to reach a whopping $623.3 billion dollars by 2023. It provides a scalable IT service model for services.
For enterprises, migrating to the cloud requires transferring data, application code & other business processes from the on-premise system to a cloud environment. It can simply be called the adoption of cloud computing. It is a marvelous way to transform your systems to suit the changing needs of your growing business. Be that as it may, moving to the cloud requires migration assessment, strategic preparation & planning.
A key requirement of cloud adoption in an enterprise is top management buy-in. CIOs are tasked with establishing and communicating the business value.
Digital leaders establish the value of cloud adoption
There are three aspects of communicating business value Return on Investment, Mapping critical issues to cloud features & enhancing enterprise capabilities.
Show ROI
Quantify short term and long-term cost savings by–
- Reducing infrastructure managed service and support costs
- Reducing s/w costs via
- Optimizing enterprise license costs
E.g. SQL Server, SharePoint, Windows OS, Office 365
- PaaS/SaaS optimizations for s/w platforms used in the organization
E.g. Messaging Services
- Applications can leverage PaaS services and its self-healing/auto-scale capabilities reducing the burden on the developer and dev-ops teams.
- A clear breakdown of business function level IT costs
Mapping critical issues to cloud features
Cloud adoption can help CXOs clear long-standing critical issues in the below areas as a path to resolution –
- Increase the quality of service through the “self-healing” nature of the standard solutions, for example, automatically allocating more storage to a database.
- Address issues in security heat maps with cloud services such as Azure security center or AWS inspector.
- Off-the-shelf solutions to operational efficiency and infrastructure technical debt.
- Compliance and audit requirements such as SOC 2
Enhances Enterprise Capabilities
Cloud Adoption can help Improve the overall flexibility of IT infrastructure in meeting business needs, such as more frequent releases of business features.
- Rapid experimentation and prototyping with the ability to deploy to lower environments in the cloud by quant developers and QRAs
- Solve complex problems at scale and speed with out-of-box data engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence
- Self-service of deployment of quant and risk calculations provided they have good functional tests.
Migrating to the cloud is a difficult step for many organizations, but it is nevertheless inevitable.
Quoting McKinsey, “The cloud is a means, not an end. Success in modernizing IT through the cloud is driven by a complete standardization and automation strategy.” Thus, the sooner your enterprise adapts to the cloud, the better. You can try migrating your disaster recovery first to understand how cloud adoption works at a lesser risk.