How enterprises can break down barriers and maximize Cloud value

• Many companies are not advancing fast enough in-terms of unlocking business value from their Cloud deployments
• Over 75% of companies haven’t fully achieved expected outcomes even though they deployed Cloud solutions as a response to COVID-19
• Cloud adopters also face multiple hurdles which need careful consideration and finding new ways of working with Cloud
• Creating a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to manage Cloud investments and avoid learning curve delays can help companies access key skills while keeping costs down. Unlock industry and function specific knowledge by leveraging skills and experience of appropriate partners.

Enterprises are increasingly doing Cloud deployments to help their business adapt to rapidly evolving environment, improve elasticity, efficiency and innovation. Especially after COVID-19, being “Cloud first” became the key to survive and enable social distancing, online commerce and improve efficiency.

IMSS identified that most Cloud deployments are not achieving their desired outcomes and the business value reaped from Cloud initiatives is not always optimal. IMSS identified the top three common hurdles and barriers companies face that erode value.

The complexity of Cloud migration gives rise to a number of obstacles. We identified distinct patterns with respect to the most frequent hurdles companies face from fully achieving their expected Cloud results.

Legacy Infrastructure & Application Sprawl: Many companies made the leap into Cloud migration without thoroughly evaluating their existing and legacy IT and application stack. In-depth assessment to evaluate their move from in-house to Cloud infra, impact on existing services and how to build around these systems to maximize efficiencies.

Complexity of Business and Misalignment Between IT & Business: Many companies poorly handled the Organizational Change Management (OCM) due to poor communication with managers, front-line employees and other stakeholders about commonly-held problems and discuss how Cloud transition can help solve those problems, whether that’s through streamlining operations, providing high-visibility into supply chain etc.,

Data Sovereignty, Compliance & Security: Concerns over security & compliance with standards had been a costly drain on companies who deployed Cloud solutions. While, virtually every company has compliance issues that need managed, some industries such as medical service providers faced significantly more stringent requirements for compliance.

To achieve the full potential of cloud requires more than just budget and technology. Organizations must incorporate new ways of working and develop new roles and skills. Here are our top recommendations to help you realize maximum return on investments (ROI) with your Cloud migration.

See the big picture, beyond just the infrastructure: Enterprises need to fully transform their development, operations, security, risk and compliance, and business teams to work differently. Cloud and agile methodologies work together to enable faster development cycles, more efficient capability deployment and improved customer experiences. Teams can more than double their productivity by eliminating and automating the low-value activities they’re using to manage legacy environments.

Managing demand volatility and patterns: Many companies treat Cloud as an all-or-nothing service. The cost of migrating some applications may far outweigh the benefit from running on cloud, and it’s important to plan for what workloads will remain on-premises. The cloud lets you pay for only what you consume.

Cloud optimization begins with migration: The Cloud’s biggest benefits is also it’s major risk: Instant provisioning allows for rapid innovation but also can cause usage to grow out of hand if not optimized properly. Confronted by the choice of services, many companies leave optimizations to individual teams which can get the cost out of hand. To measure the benefits of migrating to the cloud, companies should deploy monitoring and software asset management services to track spend and ramp consumption up and down as needed. A shared governance framework and a set common policies are key to enable innovation while controlling costs and managing risk.

Optimizing both “supply” and “demand” sides: Companies need to establish guiding principles and goals on Cloud migration for align incentives and performance measures across business units so that leaders can be held responsible for supply and demand side targets. On the “Demand” side, teams must be held accountable to their migration commitments. If they miss a cloud migration window, you may have to renew a five- to seven-year facility lease. On the “Supply” side, hold the infrastructure team accountable for rapidly decommissioning and adjusting their operating model to better monetize efficiencies.