So, you’ve decided that adopting the enterprise cloud is the right move for your business due to the many advantages it affords. That’s the easy part, now you’ve got to build and deploy the right solution.
For many organisations, accepting and delivering change is extremely difficult. However, if you want to reap the rich rewards of the enterprise cloud, you must adjust your perspective on managing IT and ensure staff are ready for a new approach before modifying processes and infrastructure.
Adjusting your perspective
Seeing as change is inevitable in the world of IT, you must adapt or become irrelevant when it comes to building and deploying solutions such as the enterprise cloud.
One example is the long-adopted 80/20 rule – 80 per cent of IT spending and effort should keep the lights on, while only 20 per cent needs to be dedicated to innovation and propelling the business forward. In today’s fast-moving digitally connected society, a lack of focus on revenue generating activities doesn’t cut it anymore.
By deploying enterprise cloud and enabling hyperconverged infrastructure, IT can shift some of that 80 per cent onto other activities. An enterprise cloud infrastructure includes automation capabilities and user self-service, which helps reduce reliance on IT and frees up resources elsewhere.
Also, with a revamped economic model that enables just-in-time infrastructure and easy scaling, that 80 per cent of the IT budget can be reduced further.
Ensuring staff are ready
For quite some time now, businesses have had to hire specialists for each area of IT infrastructure. But because hyperconverged infrastructure driven enterprise cloud systems focus on higher-level outcomes, a different set of skills are required than traditional drudge work.
Tomorrow’s IT ‘generalists’ will have a breadth, not necessarily a depth, of knowledge to simplify and support complex technology in the datacentre. While such a change could feel like a threat to existing staff, those with subject-specific expertise will still thrive as every area of IT is still represented in this new paradigm.
Modifying processes and infrastructure
Most IT departments buy what they think they’ll need for the duration of the replacement cycle, which is typically five years. But despite your best intentions, these estimates are somewhat tricky because business needs can rapidly change and there’s a strong chance you won’t use all the capacity you’ve purchased.
With enterprise cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure, you can begin to adopt a just-in-time approach to datacentre resources. This method allows you to also adopt cloud-like pay-as-you-go economics with no zero ROI zone – you’re effectively using what you’ve purchased.
