The cloud will be a major player in business technology for years to come. Businesses that successfully exploit its capabilities can have an edge over their competitors, and it might even determine their survival. New advancements in 2022 will enable organizations to improve their cloud deployment while also extend it into previously unsuitable use cases. Here are 6 steps CIOs must consider while creating, implementing, and maturing their cloud strategy.
- Design cloud strategy to deliver maximum business value in minimum time
- In an ever-changing business environment, cloud services play an important role in making businesses more agile. To deliver maximum business value in the minimum time, CIOs can map cloud strategies to their three key priorities: strategy and innovation; governance and security; and mobilization and migration.
- While designing a cloud strategy, consider how the cloud will solve business problems and enable innovations.
- Focus on adaptable governance frameworks for having flexibility in handling different implementation demands and risk profiles.
- Strategies must be designed for cloud success and to support the transformation of the organization.
- Prioritize a primary provider when implementing multicloud architectures
- Adding a second cloud provider for additional application use cases will improve flexibility. However, multicloud strategies can increase complexity and cost in the future.
- To address this, prioritize a primary, preferred provider so that if there are business requirements that the provider cannot meet, then you can add additional providers in an orderly manner driven by specific business needs.
- Focus on developing a cloud workload placement framework that matches needs with the appropriate cloud provider.
- Focus on resilient application architecture
- Resilience is a business differentiator and if you can maintain business continuity when your competitors suffer through delays and downtimes, that showcases the superiority of your product.
- According to a forecast by Gartner, by the end of 2025, 30% of enterprises will establish new roles focused on IT resilience and boost end-to-end reliability, tolerability and recoverability by at least 45%.
- Shift focus to resilient application architectures and embrace modern IT resilience instead of individual service continuity.
- Meet hybrid cloud needs with distributed cloud
- Private and/or hybrid clouds bring in complexity and unmanageability and often doom private cloud projects. Instead adopt distributed cloud solutions that extend the same native public cloud services to local infrastructure, while being under the same management schema as the hybrid cloud.
- These cloud services are distributed to locations able to meet hybrid and private cloud needs while retaining the advantages of classic public cloud consumption.
- Enable cloud computing with containers and serverless
- Containers and serverless computing are becoming attractive as cloud computing principles become more embedded in application development and infrastructure operations.
- Container and serverless computing help to use resources better for the applications that need them, thereby improving infrastructure agility, automation, efficiency and cost optimization.
- Develop public cloud skills internally to bridge the talent gap
- I&O technical professionals lack the cloud skills required to satisfy the growing demand for cloud services.
- Consider building a talent enablement program (TEP) for promoting and developing the necessary skills and creating the necessary roles within the IT organization.
- Additionally, take measures to bridge the cloud skills gap. Read 6 ways IT leaders can tackle the growing software engineering skills shortage.
Source: Gartner
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