Despite the ongoing health and economic crisis, the Texas technology job market is going strong—CompTIA ranked our state #2 for IT job postings last month. This is thanks, in part, to the pandemic-induced digital acceleration and renewed urgency to move to the cloud. But, just because companies are in the cloud doesn't mean they are getting the full value out of it.
In fact, nearly two thirds of businesses report that they have not achieved the results expected of their cloud initiatives, according to an Accenture study.
This would be a problem even in the best of times. COVID-19 has reminded us that systems resilience and adaptability is an existential issue for businesses. Enterprises must be able to sustain operations under sever disruption, manage volatility, and support employees to work from home at scale if they’re to survive.
The cloud, of course, is ideally suited to meet all these requirements—but only if deployed optimally and at scale. Businesses are, therefore, coming to realize that cloud-first models are no longer an aspiration for the future; they’re an imperative for today.
More haste, less speed
As urgent as it may be, businesses must not rush their migration to the cloud. A botched transformation will ramp up costs where legacy IT systems run alongside cloud alternatives. What’s needed is a smart cloud strategy that balances speed with value. Any such strategy must start with defining value before mapping out a journey to the cloud that demonstrates exactly how implementations will help the organization realize its goals around resilience, agility, and adaptability.
While no two cloud migrations are the same, there are five steps every enterprise must take to ensure an effective migration strategy. All five are required to achieve success:
1. Migrate and scale up. Move most of your workloads to the cloud rapidly, securely, and with confidence by selecting the right infrastructure for your business needs. By focusing on migration at scale you can ensure a more efficient, resilient and customer focused enterprise. For instance, one global pharmaceutical company moved to the cloud in search of greater elasticity. Its successful migration enabled the company to conduct computer-intensive clinical trial simulations that previously took 60 hours in just 1.2 hours—a 98% improvement.
2. Make the most of the hyperscalers. Apply the innovations and investments from these big cloud providers to create value for your business. Companies that are building true partnerships with the likes of Microsoft Azure, AWS, Alibaba, and Google Cloud are seeing impressive results. Take the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine as an example. The organization is using Google Genomics to analyze hundreds of genomes in days and return query results in seconds, while providing reliable security for DNA data.
3. Modernize and accelerate. Ramp up your organizational speed and agility by restructuring architectures, applications, and data for cloud. This will be a long-term process for most organizations, based on application discovery assessment and considering where the company’s future direction. The work pays dividends. One major utility company reduced its alert outage system costs from millions to less than $10 annually by implementing an event-driven serverless architecture.
4. Run and optimize. Adopt new ways of operating that push your cloud estate to ever higher levels of business performance and sustainability. To run optimally, the cloud demands continuous consumption management, as well as capacity, performance, and cost management. These optimization levers demand new skills which can be acquired through internal reskilling of the IT team, or by working with partners. The effort is worthwhile: one natural resources company saved approximately one million dollars per month in backup costs by applying optimization tools.
5. Innovate and grow. Use cloud as a digital transformation lever, creating a foundation for rapid experimentation, innovation, and new business models. Migration to the cloud allows you to free up resources to focus on how systems can adapt to what the business and its customers will need next. The cloud also enables access to an ecosystem of partners—and that can be an innovation game-changer.
The COVID-19 crisis will be behind us at some point, but the ability for organizations to support more remote work, agility, and innovation will continue to be critical. Now is the critical moment to embrace a cloud-first strategy so you can emerge stronger. These five steps of successful cloud adoption will give Texas companies—and our economy at large—a competitive advantage.
Kris Torres is a Dallas-based associate director at Accenture and leads the local Cloud Innovation Center. She helps clients accelerate their business goals through cloud-powered product and process innovation.