Cloud

The cloud quandary

By: | Rakesh Thakur

Publish Date: February 20, 2020

Much has been documented, said and promoted about “the cloud” in the last ten years or so. Thanks to the World Wide Web, there have been several breakthroughs and information ready today at our fingertips. Much to our surprise, even then, businesses are hesitant about accepting this technology or unaware of how to make most of this technology.
The market has always been bucketed as per management principles into innovators, early majority, early adopters, late majority, and the laggards. We also know that sustainable financial growth, competitive edge, and rich culture distinguish innovators from laggards. I am bewildered every single time a new technological wave such as the Cloud hits the market; these are the five categories players end up falling into. Economic downturns are impossible to predict, but it is never too late to prepare how you would weather the next downturn or disruption– whenever the wave hits.
So why do some decision-makers not push themselves into becoming early adopters or at least push to be in the early majority or an early adopter?
The steam engine of our century
The globe has moved on from mainframe systems of the past to today’s serverless technology. This has revolutionized business transaction systems in the world altogether. While the very first industrial revolution in the late 18th century changed the world by getting us places and producing goods quickly, Cloud today is the critical enabler of the next industrial revolution.
Technology is democratic, and a harbinger of great things to come. Even Gartner has predicted that by next year, a corporate no-cloud policy will be as uncommon as a no-internet policy is in today’s day and age. Yet many industries, such as the pharma or financial services, are uncertain about welcoming it. Not because they are against embracing new technologies for business improvement, but partly because they have concerns regarding the risk of change, security, impact to business continuity, end-customer satisfaction, a perceived lack of control, and costs.
Let us call it the cloud quandary in the context of this blog. While change is hard, managing it can be seamless if premeditated and tailored to your business’ future. There are many causal aspects of businesses not allowing them to adopt these new changes, but the two below stand out, primarily:

  1. Knowing your tool, the why, how and when
Despite the benefits of cutting-edge technology being promising, business leaders are often not able to understand the tools in their entirety. Cloud does not limit its powers to just hosting an application on a data center from a third party partner, but it also provides a way to create a competitive edge in the market. Modernizing the systems architecture is your opportunity to use business tools and applications in an enhanced and agile way.
Most stakeholders in corporate IT departments are aware of the buzzwords such as Content Delivery Networks, Containerization, Microservices, Serverless batch processing, etc., yet cannot simplify the jargon to realize the true potential of these new-age accuracy driven architectural techniques. Today we can make the life of business easy by enhancing fault isolation, i.e., failure in one isolated module does not affect larger applications and thereby minimizing risk to business continuity. Businesses using this technique have found their dependence on a single technology stack lowered drastically, allowing them to be flexible enough to try new innovative pathways on the Cloud. Once a business can comprehend the concept and potential of Cloud tailored to its outcomes, and how it can relate to its environment, adopting the Cloud becomes a natural business choice.
This very theory is also applicable to data technologies. From obtaining to consuming data from social media, web searches, shopping history, backend ERP, data warehouses, dashboards, reports, and every consumer-centric information –businesses must have a data flow architecture designed to be able to consume and manage information in real-time to stay ahead of the curve. Without understanding the technology and its purpose for your business, it would be impossible to take a decisive step forward.
  1. Continuously sharpening your edge
Over hundreds of our conversations with individuals who manage business aspects and the people who manage the IT in their organizations – big and small, one aspect that has come out is the disparity in communication between the two. Both the operational and informational functions of an organization are crucial to deciding whether they should adopt a technology. If they are, they need to then clearly state the key business and technology drivers, and measure them (at least an estimate) to quantify success in the end. Then they need to do it again, and again.
IT organizations today are playing a vital role in empowering core competencies and business functions and processes. Without everyone on board and an organizational change management strategy in place to enable a smooth transition, it would be easy to be benched among the laggards of technology. Almost 80% of the world’s CEOs stated in recent polling that they are not yet prepared to tackle the growing complexities of their business environment. Continuous attention to IT is necessary towards exploring new tools that will impact the future and end consumers.
To jump over this hurdle, businesses, if they lack internal competency, need to work with experienced managed digital services partners who not only have been part of the evolving digital wave but also have domain expertise across industries. With the right knowledge and implementation partners, decision-makers can evaluate their systems, integrate new technologies, and provide both the IT and business with the right insights to accelerate safe adoption.

Overcoming your quandary, jumping to action
The cloud quandary, in my view, is going to be much more prominent in the days of sudden disruptions. The question all business leaders will face is how can they green signal digital initiatives that will truly realize the next productivity gain, and perhaps avoid ones that will not? If you have already addressed the mentioned two challenges above, you are on the path to glory! Keep in mind, picking the right cloud-enabled actions to drive sustainable success will require you to keep your ears to the ground for the latest trends.
At YASH Technologies, we continuously run business, domain, and technology-agnostic campaigns towards sharing knowledge and conduct free workshops to train and converse with both the business and the IT world from organizations all over the world. Feel free to write to us if you would like to conduct a free workshop at your office.
After all, as one of the founding fathers of the US once said, “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”

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