Can a Hybrid Cloud Strategy Boost IT Transformation Adoption?
Breaking out of old perceptions about the role of IT departments be the key to being part of companies’ overall digital transformation strategies.
Change may be hard, especially when modernizing legacy systems, but naturally it is crucial to explore “transformative measures” to keep enterprises competitive. Moreover, this can be a turning point for IT departments to prove how they can be part of businesses’ evolution — or risk seeing the transformation process handled by another party.
IT teams may see their efforts to enact transformation and change stymied by such factors as the scale of the system to be updated but there may be ways to mitigate such issues, according to a survey conducted by IDG Research Services. Late last year, Insight Enterprises commissioned the survey, “Challenge of Change: IT in Transition,” which polled 200 IT executives from enterprises.
The results show that just over half (51%) of the respondents hit roadblocks while planning and executing their IT transformation initiatives. In those instances, the difficulties they faced led to the initiatives being put on hold or being partially abandoned. One of the issues cited was the magnitude of effort needed to change or move on from legacy systems, some of which are used by upwards of 10,000 employees.
Shawn O’Grady, senior vice president and general manager of cloud and data center transformation at Insight, says his company provides consulting on cloud strategies to Fortune 2000-size enterprises. “We’ll have clients that say they want to move 80 percent of their workload into public cloud,” he says. “We have other customers who are just the opposite and want the majority of the workload to run on private infrastructure.”
The concept of IT transformation, O’Grady says, is really an effort by IT executives to change their departments to serve as the people who handle the overall digital transformation within the company, not just the legacy systems. If an enterprise looks to its IT department to be responsible for such a change, it takes advantage of the available digital technologies across the enterprise, he says. Companies might take a different route though, O’Grady says, and turn to an outside, third-party source for the bulk of the digital transformation work.
This may happen because of an assumption that the IT department is better suited to focus only on the legacy systems. That can put an IT team in a position where they are not seen as part of the solution for overall digital transformation, he says. The needs for transformation can vary from enterprise to enterprise, whether it is adopting a cloud-first strategy or a hybrid cloud approach that retains some on-premise elements. The cloud strategies can be private cloud networks or third-party services.
