CONTRIBUTOR
The last few years have been unexpectedly turbulent. Both in our personal lives and in the corporate world, there have been significant changes that have required individuals and business leaders alike to be even more resilient and adaptable to changing conditions.
Today, COVID recommendations and protocols have changed, and businesses have quickly modified policies on hybrid and remote work, signaling yet another shift in how we do business. And as inflation has risen, investors and large corporations have taken a harder look at growth plans and how to deliver on them. Markets have tumbled and layoffs at technology companies are making headlines. To adjust to these changes and a seemingly inevitable economic downturn, organizations need to alter their focus in 2023.
In 2021 and 2022, many teams embarked on cloud migration plans due to data center closures and technology refresh plans. In the year ahead, we will be faced with fresh political and economic changes, and business priorities can and should change with them. The approaches that organizations take to cloud migration projects are going to be different this year, and those differences will be most noticeable on the ground, where cloud migration teams and managers make hundreds of tactical decisions about how to deliver on business priorities.
Most companies need to focus on staff productivity and cost savings in the year ahead, but what does that look like? For your business to become leaner and more efficient over the next two years, you must focus on three key areas:
- Increase agility across business and IT
- Improve operational resiliency & efficiency
- Reduce costs
Increase Agility
The first step organizations must take is to understand why cloud migrations need to be business-led.
In the past, all too often the IT and infrastructure teams led internal cloud adoption programs. While IT and infrastructure always play a pivotal role in any migration plans, leadership teams need to embrace cloud migrations as drivers of agility. Cloud-native applications help scale with demand, deliver updates without disrupting performance and quickly adapt to changing requirements.
The finance team understands the importance of making operational expenses more aligned with value delivery and cost-efficient. Porting legacy applications to cloud-native apps can help them achieve both goals. And while finance teams appreciate the ability to better forecast operating costs in the cloud and reduce maintenance and licensing costs, the C-Level executives need to understand their role in leading and supporting cloud migration plans that increase speed to market and improve operational efficiencies.
Public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), can help IT teams focus on creating new applications and services to drive business growth and simplify the engineering ecosystem while also making it more agile and flexible.
Improve Resiliency & Efficiency
Business leaders must ensure that IT teams are driving efficiencies in operations, increasing staff productivity at the same time that these teams are improving operational resiliency. If more of the world gets pulled into conflicts, operational resiliency will also become a larger driver of cloud migrations, particularly within the public sector.
The past year has shown cloud migration as a proven and effective strategy for Ukraine’s continuity of operations. Even if geopolitical tensions ease over the next few months, the economic uncertainties coming out of years of quantitative easing (QE) are also important in the months ahead.
Stakeholders can also realize efficiencies across the organization and task stack. Cloud migration projects can help organizations consolidate their application and server inventories and reduce maintenance and licensing costs, making costs more predictable and manageable.
Embracing cloud can also boost staff productivity by saving thousands of hours a year in server configuration time as well as reducing the number of times an incident ticket gets reassigned with service desks. These increases in efficiency can further help organizations become more resilient during challenging times.
Reduce Costs
Every organization is looking at ways to optimize spend and increase cost savings, and cloud migrations are no exception. With business-led migrations, it is critical to perform transformative migrations to the cloud, not more lift-and-shift projects that simply move legacy applications to cloud environments but do not achieve meaningful cost savings.
Business leaders must understand that it is possible to achieve over a 50% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) across the portfolio by re-platforming high-value applications as cloud native apps. The CEO, CTO, CFO, and CIO must be involved in these migration projects and understand what changes are necessary in applications and business processes to realize the cost savings of moving to the cloud.
Business-Led Cloud Priorities in 2023
The key to reducing costs and driving productivity efficiency gains is recognizing that organizational change is required. Companies cannot continue to operate as they have in the past and expect to reap the benefits of cloud. Working with and engaging your business stakeholders early ensures that we understand the business demands and can articulate how the cloud can help deliver on them. This collaboration is critical to making the right decisions. Once more business leaders understand this, it will drive a fundamental shift in cloud migration plans in 2023 and beyond.
