What is in Cloud for IT Organizations?
IT has always been looking for solutions to operate with less budgets, but the reality of the world is skyrocketing increase in expenditures without comparable increase in value provided to the core business. Cloud computing is a promising solution that can reduce costs while increasing value and it can do so by allowing more efficient use of IT resources.
Today IT organizations are usually busy with keeping the existing IT infrastructure operational, and not with new projects that can bring more value to the business. Cloud computing, yet, promotes innovation by reducing the latency between the conception of an idea and its deployment.
Moreover, cloud computing can upsize your IT infrastructure on demand dynamically aligning directly to the needs of the business at light speed bypassing the procurement and manual provisioning cycles. Like upsizing on-demand, one also needs to think what it will take in time and money to reduce computing capacity. Cloud computing provides swift upsizing and downsizing on-demand also known as elasticity.
With cloud, providing more value with fewer cash becomes a reality by spending less and less on CapEx rather than more and more on OpEx. Through the mechanisms of virtualization and multi-tenancy, hardware and software users are managed within a limited number of physical servers, and new resources can be dynamically allocated or de-allocated as required.
Besides, the ability to shift the risk from your enterprise to the cloud computing solution is huge. With private clouds, this means the core risks around the success of the IT solution are significantly reduced because you avoid the cost of dedicated and static hardware and software that cannot be pooled. With public cloud providers, you shift the capital risks to the provider who is in a much better position to manage those risks.
Agility is core to the value of cloud computing. While there are indeed OpEx and CapEx cost savings, the ability to quickly adjust IT infrastructure to meet the ever-changing demands of the business typically provides the greatest benefits over time. However, many times these benefits are not measured or measurable. CIOs should factor the value of agility as well for making the case for Cloud.
Co-Founder at Lynx Automation
8yVery well written Mustafa Tinmaz. As long as the tradeoffs can be fully quantified a better decision can be made. But difficulty of quantification, results into an open ended debate.
Partner - Head of North America FinOps / TBM Advisory
9yThank you for your concise summary of cloud solutions’ value proposition. At leading financial services companies, I see that the debate about whether or not to go to cloud has shifted to a new debate about the type of (hybrid) cloud. Business and IT leaders are now serious about the potential of AWS, Microsoft, etc., as disrupters of the traditional Enterprise IT.
Great article! In organizations where cloud is a forbidden word, I use the phrase "agile, efficient, elastic" because those are the three value props that best define what a cloud enabled Software Defined Infrastructure are all about. And in the end, without Agility nothing else matters, particularly to the business.