Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 34 | Page 39

No easy oversight of hardware and software maintenance contracts also makes it harder to understand what you are paying for. As always, the answer is to engineer systems that break these silos, giving teams the oversight they need to better plan and manage operations, both onsite and in the cloud. Without reviewing existing infrastructure, companies cannot start the migration journey, or assess progress once they have begun. Data silos prevent most businesses from accurately assessing performance, which makes forward planning an exercise in guesswork, not evidence-based decision- making. In many cases, real-time information simply isn’t available or is incomplete. This lack of oversight makes strategic decision-making almost impossible in the age of disruptive computing and Digital Transformation. Increasing real-time visibility will need to be a priority as you transition to the cloud. www.intelligentcio.com “ MOST COMPANIES SIMPLY DO NOT FULLY UNDERSTAND THEIR CURRENT INFRASTRUCTURE, WHICH IS A SIGNIFICANT PROBLEM WHEN PLANNING A MIGRATION TO THE CLOUD. Knowing IT assets is one thing but understanding how they are used is another. Businesses with failing cloud migration projects typically lack several key insights. In the same way that businesses lack insight into their existing infrastructure, many have not fully understood how it is being used. This means they are unable to align services to infrastructure, map out service dependencies, or build an application and service roadmap to plan how cloud-based systems will affect or improve system usage. Despite massive improvements in data protection technologies, many businesses are still leaving themselves unprotected. For many companies, disaster recovery plans are regarded as an insurance policy and are never tested or updated. This is compounded by a fear of change and an inability to reverse what they do if something goes wrong, and can lead to INTELLIGENTCIO 39 39