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. 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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