CIOs must take a differentiated approach to cloud computing – developing a formal strategy that helps to align individual cloud decisions with the overall enterprise’s strategic goals.
Cloud computing has firmly established its roots across all industries -manufacturing, supply chain, and automotive – and is fast becoming one of the fastest-growing segments of IT expenditure. With this widespread cloud adoption, cost optimization is becoming even more crucial. Multicloud strategies will promote provider independence to address concentration risk. Needless to say, with crunched budgets, the CIOs have more responsibility to invest budgets wisely. They are accountable for the RoI ensuing for their decisions to invest, after all
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Below are five factors that CIOs must remember, to thrive in a cloud-first world:
Multicloud adoption will reduce vendor lock-in
For enterprises using cloud services across multiple geographies, zeroing on just one public cloud infrastructure provider to match up the needs is a struggle. In such cases, the decision to use a multi-cloud strategy is even more critical.
In a recent survey by Gartner on cloud adoption, about 81% of respondents said they are working with a minimum of two providers, and by 2024 they aim to reduce vendor dependency by adopting multi-cloud strategies. CIOs are already aware that multi-cloud computing decisions are usually based on three considerations:
- Sourcing: to increase agility and minimize/eliminate vendor lock-in.
- Architecture: modern applications are designed to span multiple cloud providers and their services.
- Governance: to ensure operational control, firms are focusing on unifying administration and monitoring of their IT systems
Insufficient cloud IaaS skills delaying migrations
By 2022, experts believe that IaaS skills will delay cloud migration by two or more years due to cloud skill deficiency. The cloud migration strategies today tend to be more towards “lift-and-shift” than toward modernization or refactoring. To overcome the challenges of workforce shortage, enterprises need to collaborate with managed service providers having a proven track record of successful cloud migrations within the target industry. Such a partnership allows us to quantify, commit, and justify the expected costs and potential savings.
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Vendor training will enhance cloud security
Cloud security breaches and “misconfigured database” or mismanagement by unnamed “third party” has become common. Concerns about cloud security have led some CIOs to limit their firm’s use of public cloud services. However, the main challenge regarding cloud security lies in the policies and technologies for security and technology control. In almost all cases, it is the user and not the cloud provider, who fails to manage the controls, put in place to protect an organization’s data.
CIOs need to change their line of questioning from “Is the cloud secure?” to “Is my company using the cloud securely?” The focus should be on implementing vendor-specific training for their staff and also to apply risk management practices to make better cloud decisions.
Cost optimization will drive cloud adoption
Through 2024, nearly all applications migrating to public cloud IaaS will need to be cost-optimized. Teams need to recognize the importance of optimization as an integral part of cloud migration projects and focus on developing skills and processes to analyze operational data and find cost optimization opportunities. Leveraging what the cloud providers offer, and augmenting it with third-party solutions, is the key to maximize savings.
In 2020, CIOs should consider these trends that should drive their cloud adoption and migration plans for the years to come, taking initiatives to prepare their IT infrastructure for the future of cloud migration.
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