Making cloud feature in business value, the benefits of cloud computing

An event often triggers a home move – an increase in family size, the need to work from home – and the same is true of the move to cloud computing. The digitisation of the economy will require organisations to increase their usage of cloud computing if they are to effectively manage data levels, build apps and services that are cloud-native and therefore able to meet the needs of customers, and enable the diverse and remote workforce that will shape the modern enterprise. Before a home buyer hits Purple Bricks or Zoopla, at the very least, they jot down what the house must feature. To get business value from cloud computing, it is vital that organisations define their requirements and expectations. These will typically be the business needs and how enterprise cloud computing delivers business outcomes and meets key performance indicators (KPI).

The definition stage will help the organisation with the technical processes that follow, such as migrating applications and workloads to the cloud. With a well-defined understanding of the features that the business requires, it will be possible to determine the configurations and features needed. This process is best achieved as a business-wide objective, with technologists, business lines, senior leadership team and the technology partner working together to harmonise the requirements and, therefore, the feature set the enterprise will use.

Business Benefits of Cloud Computing

The features of the cloud estate must be constantly connected to business value. Management consultancy McKinsey notes in a paper that businesses that get the most value from software investments are those that “tackle entrenched cultural and structural barriers”. The features and scalability of cloud computing enable organisations to become data-centric, agile and efficient, which beneficially changes the culture.

Scalability in Cloud Computing

Early in the move towards enterprise cloud computing, organisations simply lifted and shifted their application stack and business operating models to the cloud. The scalability of the cloud provided frontline workers with greater scope; as a result, cloud computing only temporarily reduced IT operating costs. The business value of the cloud is to re-engineer data and business processes to take advantage of the cloud’s scale and adopt features, applications, and tools that completely modernise the organisation and the way it operates.

The greenfield businesses that were born cloud-native have taken this approach, which has allowed them to seize a significant slice of their chosen vertical market.

McKinsey adds in a separate paper that organisations must use the features of the cloud to tackle integration, tech debt and patchwork service problems that inhibit the modern large enterprise, particularly those in financial services and the public sector. McKinsey warns that organisations can rapidly add new technology capabilities to their businesses with cloud computing, but without a clear focus on the business value, this can add to increases in business complexity and, therefore, the maintenance and operating costs.

Advantages of Cloud Computing

Cloud adoption is also an opportunity to reduce existing costs and complexity. In a partnership with esynergy, Public sector organisation Ofqual was able to reduce its dependence on legacy technology with a new enterprise cloud approach. esynergy identified that the legacy infrastructure of Ofqual no longer fitted the needs of the digital services and data services the government organisation offered; as a result, Ofqual carried a significant level of technical debt. From August 2020, esynergy began replacing the legacy estate using the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for the Azure environment. On-premise servers were migrated to Microsoft Azure; in addition, existing Azure deployments were replatformed, cutting inefficient Azure usage and reducing cloud computing costs at the department. Ofqual has also benefited from increased automation, operational efficiency, and working methods.

The structural modernisation of an organisation, which makes full use of the cloud and the features it offers, will deliver value if there is a constant focus on the needs of the organisation. Just as the features of a home may need to be changed according to new needs, this constant focus on usage will ensure the features match the demands.