When it comes to evaluating the impact that cloud will have on your digital transformation, there’s no easy answer. The response mostly depends on who you ask.
For C-level executives, cloud is most certainly an enabler. It allows business leaders to adapt their organizations to shifts in markets with speed an agility. Executives moving their companies to the cloud often find that they innovate and seize competitive advantages much faster.
For users—whether employees, consumers, or B2B customers—cloud is also a major boon. It offers exciting on-demand services across a broad array of categories. Employees get cloud-based enterprise applications that allow them to do their jobs better and more efficiently from anywhere. Consumers get the likes of Spotify and Uber at their fingertips 24x7. B2B customers get on-demand CRM, HR, and data backup.
But for IT architects, things aren’t always so simple. If you work for a new enterprise that has built an IT infrastructure from scratch within the last few years, it’s easy: cloud is the ultimate enabler. Go for it.
But if you’re an architect for a business that has an installed base of legacy infrastructure technologies—and face it, that’s everyone else—the situation is very different. Cloud can be a major disruptor, because your current IT ecosystem is likely a delicate balance of interconnections. That means you probably need IT review board approval to make any infrastructure changes. Otherwise, you run the risk of breaking five things for every single component you touch.
Architects don’t have the option of forcing an abrupt migration of legacy technologies to cloud-based infrastructures. Some of those old architectures don’t scale so you’re stuck in the middle: needing to keep your legacy infrastructure stable while satisfying cries from the lines of business to innovate.
Your dilemma: How do you build an architecture that responds to business needs—which often means finding opportunities to become more cloud-like—without disrupting the business?
You have already put some of the tools in place by virtualizing your environments. Abstraction is the basis of cloud, after all. It is a step toward an API-enabled infrastructure that helps you automate.
