The Enterprise cloud journey - Why cloud - Thu, Jan 3, 2019
The reasoning for going to cloud are different for many enterprises, but there is at least one thing that they have in common: their core business is not datacenters.
They don’t sell or maintain datacenters as their core business, but they still have to manage datacenters because of their IT solutions.
The journey into cloud can start in several ways, the following are some of the motivations that I’ve got after interviews with companies of different sizes:
- Internal pushes from below where developers need more than what the current organization can offer - leading to shadow IT.
- External drivers including customers needing a platform which scales outside of current boundaries, both in terms of hardware but also regionality and local presence.
- Push from above to digitally transform the organization and start utilizing data to drive the business.
- Curiosity from business or internal services for managed systems that can simplify delivering the core business.
Besides the above motivational factors, there are also line of business factors involved in the strategic choice of cloud:
- Your developers might want to test ideas and throw them out without any real investment.
- The performance you get from the scale of the cloud which is really hard to get if your aren’t in the business of building data centers.
- The managed platforms and services with SLA’s for networking, storage, and full services such as databases and IoT control panes and the management of those.
- The global reach of the cloud, with multiple regions, zones in almost every country that has a networking point of presence.
- Pay for your usage and split the cost over the organization instead of having a centralized IT budget.
Outside of the motivational factors and the strategic choices, there are also other factors that can be part of the reasoning. I’ve talked to organizations that wanted to restructure their way of working, moving to a more agile approach. They found that their organization was hindering them. Going to cloud was then a tool to restructure both the people and the way of working.