How IT can best manage and deliver Digital Transformation

Continual Evolution In order to thrive in today’s digital-first world, businesses are increasingly moving away from legacy IT frameworks to cloud-based, outcome-orientated, digital IT environments. For most, this move to cloud promises to drive new revenue opportunities, reduce expenditures and increase agility, with a focus on strategy, operations and processes, desired outcomes, and resource planning. In fact, increasingly, internal IT departments are charged with designing and supporting new processes that deliver outcome-based services. These processes require decisions about the right cloud deployment model for the varied workloads and business applications within the organization....
Continual Evolution In order to thrive in today’s digital-first world, businesses are increasingly moving away from legacy IT frameworks to cloud-based, outcome-orientated, digital IT environments. For most, this move to cloud promises to drive new revenue opportunities, reduce expenditures and increase agility, with a focus on strategy, operations and processes, desired outcomes, and resource planning. In fact, increasingly, internal IT departments are charged with designing and supporting new processes that deliver outcome-based services. These processes require decisions about the right cloud deployment model for the varied workloads and business applications within the organization. For instance, data archiving may be best suited to a public or hosted cloud model, while sensitive healthcare patient records or financial data could be better housed in a more secure, customized and managed private cloud. The move to cloud will empower IT departments to focus resources on more strategic IT initiatives and free up capital to put towards profit-making activities. IT will see a reduction in compute- and storagerelated depreciation expense and a decrease in a facility’s power requirements. With the right partner, a cloud-based model will also allow IT to introduce automation to improve performance, simplify the purchase of infrastructure assets through a service catalogue, and provide charge-back mechanisms based on business unit consumption. Ultimately, adopting the right transformation strategy will enhance the agility, productivity, scale and speed to market of the business, giving IT departments more time and resources to focus on offering differentiated services to consumers. How easy is it for organizations to start reaping the benefits of this digital empowerment and what are the obstacles IT has to overcome to get there? The move to cloud will empower IT departments to focus resources on more strategic IT initiatives and free up capital to put towards profit-making activities. Empower Control How IT can best manage and deliver Digital Transformation Understand the Obstacles The benefits of digital transformation are undeniable for most businesses and their IT departments. However, as noted previously, it is a complex process and often requires extensive planning and additional resources to avoid the many pitfalls of going it alone. Furthermore, resistance to change, lack of a clear digital strategy, inflexible legacy IT emerging shadow IT, and reduced control over systems and applications can all frustrate the process. In particular, shadow IT can dramatically impact the operation and security of cloud-based applications and programs. Security and data governance can be thorny issues with cloud deployments. Different elements of the business can justify different cloud models based on the security benefits and risks associated with each. Increasingly, with multiple applications and programs residing outside of IT’s control, it is exceedingly difficult to ensure proper data governance, which is concerning in the face of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other data privacy regulations. For many organizations, it is also unclear who makes the judgement call as IT departments and business units often make individual decisions that are independent from each other. As organizations consider a move to cloud, other challenges involve scalability and future planning. Increasingly, IT departments are tasked with putting in place a scalable infrastructure without a full understanding of all the requirements and desired business outcomes. Executive management may wish to make a move to cloud and a scalable infrastructure, but often legacy IT is forgotten. A lack of attention to these legacy systems in advance can spell disaster, making a difficult task nearly impossible. Despite the call for IT departments to exert more influence over the business, these challenges actually erode the degree of control that IT has. So how does IT overcome these obstacles and get back control of the reins? As organizations consider a move to cloud, other challenges involve scalability and future planning. Empower Control How IT can best manage and deliver Digital Transformation
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