Johannesburg, 03 Jun 2021
Linking a cloud strategy to the business priorities is one of the critical success factors for enterprise modernisation, delegates heard at this week’s IBM Cloud Forum, hosted in partnership with ITWeb.
Speaking at the event, Amit Tuli, Executive IT Architect, GBS at IBM MEA, said modernisation and new application development were a priority for customers around the world. “We see that modernisation leads to up to 6% growth in revenue and 70% increase in speed to market. In addition, cost reduction is maximised, with savings and benefits across all areas of the business,” he said.
However, many organisations were facing common challenges as they moved to modernise their environments, he said. These included complex, hybrid environments and no common control plane; technical debt and limited application and platform knowledge; difficulty integrating with modern applications and third parties; a significant investment in existing infrastructure and applications; high operational costs and capacity limitations due to regulatory or risk compliance; and competitive forces and customers demanding faster time to market.
“Depending on their stage of maturity, we see organisations facing challenges such as managing workloads across multiple clouds. Some are doing this in a very incoherent, inconsistent manner in which they don't know what's running where and have to personally log into each cloud to see what's the cost of running that, and what security policies they need to apply,” he said. “For others, a key challenge is difficulty in integrating with modern applications and third parties. This means sometimes these integrations are so expensive and time-consuming that they just slow down all processes and derail agility.”
He said there were six key focus areas for successful modernisation: Aligning the cloud strategy and the business priorities, having a modernisation blueprint, addressing security and compliance risks, de-risking transformation, addressing cloud operations and changing the company culture to support modernisation.
“Whether the business imperatives are cost reduction, increasing the bottom line, reaching out to new markets or doing things differently, that strategy should be supplemented by the cloud strategy,” he said.
Modernising IT landscapes also requires key application capabilities – continuous application development and delivery, or DevSecOps, secure and timely access to data and applications, and the intelligent management of applications at scale, or AIOps.
Tuli noted that IBM services and solutions helped organisations overcome all of their hybrid cloud management and modernisation challenges.
Share