How your business can embrace the cloud

As large enterprises worldwide become more familiar with the pros and cons of jumping on to the cloud transformation bandwagon, there is a need to consolidate learning, and create playbooks. The serious concerns of the past years have dissolved somewhat and given place to a new set. Worries about security are today no longer on the top of the risk management list of enterprises. In their place is Availability.

A few high profile public cloud (Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS) outages last year have demonstrated how e-commerce centric establishments can be impacted significantly. This realization has driven the need to architect hybrid service deployment structures that reduce the customer impact of such outages. There are tools today that can efficiently govern workloads on hybrid cloud infrastructures, thereby reducing operational headaches within the enterprise.

There is also a greater realization that a piece-meal approach to cloud leverage will only lead to suboptimal cost optimization, insufficient improvements in agility, and perhaps greater management overheads. It is therefore important to adopt a calibrated approach that will provide the right balance of effort and benefit. Every cloud transformation effort is likely to touch multiple business processes and hence the impact may well be felt across the organization.

The oldest and most successful use of cloud service models has been Software as a Service, or SaaS. If the requirement of an enterprise closely matches the best practice processes that the service vendor has built into the offering, this is a no-brainer. But every customization adds a layer of complexity and risk. There is a natural tendency in businesses and support functions to resist change. The more the resistance, the more the customization. Beyond a point, it becomes meaningless to adopt SaaS, as multiple support and roadmap issues are bound to crop up, thereby taking away the initial benefits of fast deployment and low costs.

The picture turns a bit more complicated when it comes to Platforms as a Service, or PaaS. Here, the enterprise is building a platform from which it will, for some time to come, serve its internal and external customers. The features, reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency of the platform can be a game changer for the company. Conversely, if these aspects don’t come together well, it could lead to higher costs, poor service metrics, and annoyed customers (both internal and external). It is therefore very important to undertake PaaS initiatives in a well considered manner, with all stakeholders engaged, and with a medium to long term view of the business road map. Evident and strong sponsorship of the business is critical to the eventual success of a PaaS initiative.

Just as business transformation can be significantly helped or seriously hampered by company culture, so can your cloud leverage initiatives. By its very nature, cloud technologies touch all aspects of an enterprise’s operations. Its propensity to help or hinder must therefore be taken very seriously. It is strongly recommend that the cloud transformation leadership team include a change management expert who knows the company well. He or she should ensure that the appropriate human factors are considered through prioritization and constant communication.

This article is published in collaboration with TATA Consultancy Services. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Vish Mavathur serves as global head of the TCS Cloud Application & Platform Services Practice, an integral part of the Digital Enterprise Business Unit.

Image: An illustration picture shows a projection of binary code on a man holding a laptop computer, in an office in Warsaw June 24, 2013. REUTERS.