How can cloud migration impact your business?

 

According to Gartner, spending on public cloud services would increase by 21.7 percent to $482 billion in 2022. It estimates that by 2026, the cloud will account for 45 percent of all enterprise IT spending. According to the Wall Street Journal, dated January 5, 2022, CIOs are making sustainability a major concern, and cloud migration is proving to be an important part of that endeavour.

Making the decision to migrate your company to the cloud is only the first step. While the focus is often on the migration phase, the impact of cloud computing extends to internal corporate operations and processes. As you plan for the "end goal" of shifting to the cloud, it’s important not to ignore the continual changes. As is the case with any change introduced in the organization, your business dynamics and operations may be changed in several ways by cloud migration. There is also a possibility for unintended repercussions that will affect how much internal work is required by your organization to make the transition.

Impact on human resources: When making any internal business transformation, you must consider not only the cloud computing impact on your business but also the impact on your most valuable resource: your people. Although the migration to the cloud is mostly technical, it also includes a significant human resources component. You'll need to think about whether your teams have the appropriate abilities to run the new environment, and how you'll deal with those who don't. Since transitions are usually delicate, and this one is no exception, ensuring that you can handle the changes with care will be critical to your cloud migration.

Impact on security: There are companies that are still terrified of cloud migration because of security or data residency issues. The fact is their systems were considerably less secure and lacked sufficient backups. In the case of cloud, even if you only consider the cost of physical security required to house a data center with best security practices in place, you can see how cost savings and the ability to outsource to remote teams can help you save money without having to hire more full-time employees.

Cloud as a business enabler: Technology allows businesses to operate more efficiently. The public cloud provides efficiencies that allow your IT team to focus on strategic initiatives and business alignment rather than merely ensuring that important business applications remain healthy and running. This alignment isn't going to happen all of a sudden, and it will take time, necessitating new skills and processes between IT and various business areas.

Impact on governance: How does your company handle many initiatives that are intertwined? Traditional waterfall methodologies are unsuitable for cloud adoption because they cannot keep up with the required rate of change. Instead, teams must learn new skills in agile project management in order to finish projects on time and within budget.

Cloud offers speed and convenience with which new services may be created. It also provides the ability to experiment with novel automation and optimization approaches. To make sure that cloud consumption is accurately linked to intended business goals, new KPIs should be created.

Understanding the changes that cloud adoption will bring to your company will help you appreciate the many advantages that the cloud has to offer. A cloud adoption project should be viewed as more than just a data centre transfer. It should be viewed as a full shift in how your company offers services to your customers.