+
EDITOR’S QUESTION
ITAYI WP MANDONGA, ORACLE
PAAS CLOUD CHAMPION
(SOUTH AFRICA)
///////////////////
C
loud computing is now broadly
accepted as an economical way
to share a pool of configurable
computing resources. No one solution works
for every business. Flexibility is great, but
with so many choices, making the right
decisions can often become confusing
and overwhelming. Innovation, business
agility, a better customer experience; the
potential benefits of cloud have made it a
key component in enterprise IT strategies.
However, for technology to provide
competitive advantage for an organisation, it
needs to satisfy two themes.
First, the business must configure itself to
do something unique and valuable. Second,
competitive advantage comes from the full
range of the business’s activities. Therefore,
when embarking on the journey of cloud
computing, business process redesign needs
to be done in tandem with the cloud adoption,
to not only establish an organisation’s
advantage but to also influence whether the
advantage can be sustained.
Although cloud adoption is an IT project, the
smart money lies in evaluating its business
value. You need to look at your business’s
strategic goals and make sure that you
implement the best option to support
those targets. In the digital economy,
technology matters and you must deploy the
capabilities best suited to your company’s
digital endeavours.
When it comes to cloud adoption and
deployment, governance plays a very critical
role as the nature of cloud is such that
shadow IT can easily proliferate without
notice. The very promise of low cost, easy
provisioning and self-service in most cases,
that cloud provides, potentially allows for
anyone to buy and or deploy services without
consulting a central decision-making point.
Organisations have to put proper and
strong governance structures that can be
www.intelligentcio.com
monitored in place to manage this. Here
are some critical factors in formulating an
adoption strategy:
1. Understanding what you wish to
achieve through public cloud adoption.
Is it cost cutting, is it agility, self-
service etc or is it everything that cloud
promises? Will cloud give you these,
without or with compromise? Should
there be a compromise, how will the
organisation handle it? This addresses
the question of why the organisation is
even considering cloud.
2. It is also very important while
interrogating your cloud adoption
strategy to look at and understand all
the available options, determining what
would work best for the organisation.
• Do you deploy full-on public cloud; do
you go hybrid; what is best for
the organisation? Much of this
interrogation and determination will
depend on where the organisation is in
its IT/technology maturity.
• Does the organisation understand the
various deployment models and what is
the impact of embarking on any one of
them? Either?
• Not all workloads are suited for public
cloud. Does your organisation have
proper mechanisms to identify those
workloads that are public cloud ready?
How do you move the suitable workloads
to the public cloud? A simple ‘lift and
shift’ might not do it for the organisation
as the applications might need to be
re-architected and re-factored for optimal
deployment in the public cloud (Oracle
offers Cloud at Customer to combat
this, empowering organisations to move
workloads to the cloud while keeping their
data on their own premises)
A serious look into these points will ensure
that your organisation gets to understand
what cloud services and solutions will
address the business’ needs. n
INTELLIGENTCIO
31