Moving to the cloud is the new global strategy – Avanade

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KUCHING: Cloud is a key enabler of any digital transformation, and companies realise they need a hybrid cloud strategy to bring together the applications and information they want to access in the public cloud with the data and knowledge that reside in private clouds and other systems.

According to global survey results released in December 2014 by Avanade, more than 80 per cent of Malaysian businesses believe hybrid cloud should be one of the biggest areas of focus for their company next year.

It also reveals that 96 per cent of respondents strongly agree that hybrid cloud will enable their companies to focus on issues that are core to the growth of the business, compared to only 74 per cent which is the global average.

Subra Suppiah, country manager, Avanade Malaysia said that Malaysian companies are investing in hybrid cloud solutions at a faster rate than private or public cloud, with more than half of the companies’ applications and services to be deployed on hybrid cloud environments within an average of one and half years, according to the study.

He said that the journey to cloud is like building a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. After finding the easiest pieces, then it’s on to the next level, experimenting and testing non-critical applications on cloud is the easy step, much like assembling the horses in our puzzle.

As you begin to look at moving business applications to the cloud, the level of effort increases. But just moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud is not a transformational strategy for IT, nor is it one that provides the enterprise the ability to fully exploit the speed, scale and efficiency of the cloud.

Companies that address the integration challenge incorrectly or incompletely risk business disruptions. A cloud transformation strategy should take legacy applications into account. And it should continue with a strategy for continuing maintenance and management.

“This is a lot for most IT departments to manage, especially as they face their first cloud projects and juggle all of their other responsibilities at the same time. And they know it.

“That’s why enterprises are increasingly turning to partners with cloud experience to help them; the percentage doing so doubled to 41 per cent between 2012 and 2013.

“And the percentage that uses a partner to integrate cloud and on-premises services increased by 65 per cent over that same time, according to Forrester,” said Suppiah.

Companies that engage partners for their cloud transformations and managed services are doing so to gain the benefits of the cloud more quickly, mitigate risk and support critical operations.

Forward-thinking companies are relying on partners to help them drive innovation and entirely new ways to work. They are reshaping the value of IT by evolving to an IT services broker model.

With this approach, they shift from being the provider of IT services to being a services broker or enabler of cloud and managed services.

That is, they’re engaging partners to implement the two-speed approach to IT.

The reality is that achieving this two-speed IT strategy is pulling enterprise IT in two different directions.

This is because the resources, skills and tools required are very different; with speed of innovation requiring agile, fast, just-good-enough techniques to explore, adopt and adapt to new opportunities.

While the slower approach to legacy systems requires a greater emphasis on safety and accuracy.

“It’s clear that cloud computing continues to disrupt and transform the way organisations work in the digital world.

“We believe that with improvements in security and privacy over the last three years, hybrid cloud is now poised to move from hype to reality, offering companies a competitive advantage that better positions their organisations to grow in the future.”