To remove the organisational “inertia” in regard to the ever-changing business and market needs, organisations need to make a bold move with cloud, seek to operate with a clean core and look for ways to make their business more intelligent and responsive.
Three cloud specialists from Deloitte and Google Cloud offer insights that can help companies understand the art of the possible with cloud and SAP® solutions, and explore ideas for accelerating the move to cloud.
Emphasising that the journey to cloud is a marathon and not a sprint, Edy Sardilli, global strategic alliances and business development lead, Google Cloud, offers that companies don’t just add digital, they become digital. “You need to learn and adopt new things. People refer to it sometimes as ‘fail fast’ or create that agility, work in a scrum team where we can do some amazing things really quickly.”
Cloud has the potential to make complex on-prem landscapes a thing of the past. And to the detractors who argue against cloud Pavan Srivastava, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP submits they are missing a huge benefit and opportunity aside from the cost savings.
“With cloud, the entire platform becomes consumable, allowing organisations to concentrate on their core business, while others who are best at it, innovate faster for companies to consume without the significant capital investment.”
He drives the point home offering that moving to the cloud isn’t an ‘if’ consideration. “It is more about when is the right time to start your journey. And it is a journey, not the end state. Organisations will have to adapt slowly and will have to transition slowly as a Kinetic Enterprise as well as leveraging the cloud.”
While cloud delivers the scalability, flexibility, lower total cost of ownership that companies need, for Sardilli, the magic really happens with the right partner with industry expertise and the right approach to help them innovate to become a Kinetic Enterprise. That same partner will be critical in designing a holistic strategy around the move to the cloud, and possibly “accelerate the journey and help companies be very, very successful early on.”
Chip Kleinheksel, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, extends the focus on the core business into the realm of competitive differentiators. He submits that cloud enables companies to focus on the services, products or both that will give them an edge in the market versus building a tech infrastructure to support it.
Whether a lift and shift, a greenfield project, or innovating into an established landscape, cloud accommodates a myriad of approaches quickly and can deliver high user adoption.
It also, Sardilli suggests, delivers an opportunity to think how you can break big, complex systems into smaller pieces to build in agility, which is important at the best of times and critical for the COVID times we are in: “You can re-pivot your business and head in the right direction and come out of this a lot better. I really believe the agility, the innovation, the flexibility is really what the business benefit is.”
Along with agility, another value proposition for cloud, is speed and speed to value. IT needs to keep up with the speed of business and to do they must leverage infrastructure “that can pivot and pivot fast,” says Kleinheksel. “The innovation we’re seeing is coming hand-in-hand with what cloud can help them deliver.”
Bringing humanity into the discussion, Srivastava acknowledges how appetites for risk that accompany adapting to newer, faster technology can vary vastly. Again, with its ability to accommodate different routes and approaches, cloud is a viable option for any company, especially if it is viewed as a journey and not an end state. But his point is clear: “You’ve got to do it now.”
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