Cloud modernization that’s built for the future

Nov. 11, 2020 | By: Ricardo Madan

Cloud technology has the biggest impact for enterprise optimization

Technology plans have been impacted beyond the remainder of 2020—and although these plans have been unpredictable since the beginning of this year, many companies’ technology charters are finding ways to steam ahead. Within the full range of technology plans, we’re seeing 60% of IT decision-makers say the pressure stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating their digital transformation modernization efforts. Additionally, despite budget concerns and volatility around capital spending, global spending on transformation modernization technologies and services are forecasted to grow more than 10% by the end of this year to $1.3 trillion. As organizations plan for the “next normal,” it’s critical that they show resilience and innovation to withstand disruption. To that end, the technology that has the biggest impact as organizations look to optimize their enterprise is cloud—period.

Our partnership with digital leader Sentara Healthcare is a strong example of expanding business resiliency and pivoting toward a future enterprise in spite of unexpected and critical disruption. Their behaviors bridged their current state with AI and cloud-oriented strategies for a course for modern transformation in healthcare.

Accelerate cloud migration by prioritizing business value, vision and expectations

For organizations that are still considering a move to the cloud or are currently moving some of their legacy applications to the cloud, prioritizing business value, vision and expectations is nonnegotiable. At TEKsystems, we’ve found that unless companies have an aggressive agreement on the business value they’re looking to derive from an application cloud migration or modernization effort—and unless they hold themselves accountable to measurable expectations—they will find themselves unhappy with the results.

Company executives need to be active sponsors of these initiatives to avoid a trickle-down effect that negatively impairs other modernization and transformation efforts to stall out, or otherwise become victims to politics or organizational budget pressure. Setting a vision and goals for the “why” behind leveraging the cloud and having measurable expectations to hold yourself accountable is vital. This approach will enable you to build real value streams to technically deliver those goals across an accountable cloud journey project plan. We’ve found major success in powering that approach with a lightweight, repeatable business value framework and process as a foundation, while offering a variety of tools to peer into the future at what other priorities and issues to consider along the cloud journey.

Get ahead of threats and potential governance issues in the cloud

Cloud security issues and risk accumulation in the cloud are what keeps people up at night. It’s fair to say that although cloud security’s mission is to lower risk and exposure and to mitigate vulnerability of a company’s data or systems—hybrid, multicloud environments are making the mission more complex. As reliance grows and more workloads get into the cloud, organizations are naturally going to see more risk. And while the cloud service providers and actual platforms, like AWS, Snowflake and Google Cloud, have native security features that are effective, the responsibility for security is segmented at the network level. Regardless of the cloud platform you choose, organizations are ultimately the guardians of their own data and access. Without the know-how and an expert hand to partner with, issues can arise quickly regarding evolving threats—especially with our current remote work phenomenon.

Future-proof cloud investments through leadership

At a high-altitude view, consider future-proofing your cloud investments with ongoing leadership buy-in, leadership alignment and leadership sponsorship. Forging remarkable partnerships with cloud service provider(s), as well as modern systems integrators and consulting organizations, will prove quicker, better and faster cloud journeys. From business modernization value frameworks to cloud migration toolkits to automated code pipelines and CI/CD capabilities—it’s about accelerated momentum backed by a transformative partnership so that you can turn contribution into measurable value at speed.

Ricardo Madan is an executive leader of TEKsystems Global Services with 20 years’ experience developing people, serving customers, designing and building technology services/products, and driving a seismic array of growth venues all with the goal of significantly improving the lives and circumstances of his team, customers and community.